Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around Twitter-like “real-time” sharing and conversations. The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet. But it has just raised around $1 million.

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It’s easy to get the impression that everyone uses Twitter. And many people do! But new statistics indicate that four of five Web users are still Twitter-free. Worth keeping in mind as Google and Microsoft start plugging tweets into search results.

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A marketer offers to pay me per post. I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.

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Employees at News Corp.’s MySpace have been waiting to find out who their new ad sales boss will be. And, here she is: Nada Stirratt, who until today was running digital sales for Viacom’s MTV Networks.

Stirratt has her work cut out for her. The struggling social networking site, HQed in Beverly Hills, has been trying to reboot its image, spur innovation in its product and, most of all, pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook, has seen explosive growth.

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Twitter’s status site said this yesterday: “We’re currently diagnosing the causes of an unplanned site outage that happened a few minutes ago. We are recovering from this issue now and apologize for the interruption in service.”

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Good news (potentially) for T. Rowe Price and the other investors plowing $100 million into the revenue-free start-up: The service’s users absolutely love clicking on ads, says a new study.

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CEO Carol Bartz explains what Yahoo is getting for its $100 million ad campaign, its first global marketing effort, which was launched today in New York during Advertising Week.

Here’s the rundown of Bartz’s press conference on the branding blowout.

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Is Twitter a billion-dollar company? It is now, according to its investors. People familiar with the company tell me it has raised around $50 million in a funding round that values the start-up, which has no real revenue to speak of, at about $1 billion.

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It’s one of those mysteries that are so deep, so mysterious, they may never be solved: When Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company would “like to leave the door open for advertising,” what exactly does he mean? My guess: Twitter would like to leave the door open for advertising. Meanwhile, the company cracks down, a bit, on spammy apps.

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Five months after Google sales boss Tim Armstrong left for AOL, his old company is still reshaping its sales group. The latest move: David Fischer, who ran the company’s core self-serve ad business, is going on sabbatical later this month and will return to a different post. Newish sales boss Nikesh Arora says he hasn’t found a successor for Fischer and will step into his shoes in the meantime.

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Just how big are MySpace and Facebook? Big enough to account for nearly one in five of the display ads Web marketers buy in the U.S. That has nothing to do the number of dollars the two social networks generate, since their ad impressions are famously cheap. But at least it gives you a sense of the services’ potential.

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Spotify is the best music service you’ve never used. That’s because the much-hyped streaming music company is only available for Europeans and for a select few in the U.S. who have either gotten sneak peeks or hacked their way into it. The service took one step toward wider distribution today when Apple approved its iPhone app. But that won’t help U.S. users until the big music labels agree to American distribution deals.

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Facebook offered to buy TipJoy, then changed its mind. Now the micropayment start-up has closed, and a co-founder is working for…Facebook.

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Now that MySpace has finished its acquisition of iLike, what is it going to do with it? Don’t think music, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta stressed in a press conference today, think about “socialization of content.”

What does that mean? It means the social network has spent $19.5 million on engineering talent to help overhaul its site.

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Are you up in arms about the impending demise of tr.im, one of the many services that shorten long Web addresses? Here’s a possible solution, offered by bit.ly, the industry’s bigfoot: A nonprofit archive/graveyard for tr.im’s tiny addresses, along with anyone else who wants to participate.

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