Yahoo!Tech reveals that “Social networking company Facebook recently held acquisition talks with Twitter, the micro-blogging company, the Financial Times said.  The negotiations

[…] put a valuation of as much as $500 million on Twitter, which has become one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched start-ups, the paper said.  The talks, which were first reported by the AllThingsD blog, were confirmed to the paper by two people familiar with the situation.”

According to BBC News, “Sir Paul McCartney has said he wants The Beatles' catalogue to appear on Apple's iTunes store, but that negotiations have currently ‘stalled.’  ‘We'd like to do it,’ Sir Paul told BBC News. ‘We are very for it, we've been pushing it. But there are a couple of sticking points, I understand.’  He said ‘heavy negotiations’ were going on with their former record label EMI.”

In more Apple news, Internetnews.com writes that “Apple's legal department may have a busy holiday season ahead of it.  The Cupertino, Calif.-based iPhone maker is facing two new lawsuits stemming from its popular smartphone — a patent infringement claim tied to the iPhone's Web browser, and a second suit that claims the iPhone 3G is not delivering on Apple's promised capabilities.”

In a different article, Internetnews.com reports that “[a]fter several years of meteoric growth, Internet ad spending is coming back down to earth.  That's according to new findings from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade group representing the online advertising industry, which is pointing to the economic downturn as the culprit for the change.  The IAB partners with Pricewaterhouse Coopers to compile comprehensive ad-spending reports throughout the year based on member companies' data.”

In more gloomy economic news, the Wall Street Journal cites a report by research firm Gartner which predicts that “[g]lobal mobile-phone sales [will] drop next year as the economic slowdown hits consumer demand world-wide.  ‘We expect sales in 2009 to show a low-single-digit growth contraction’ from 2008 levels, said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. Market conditions are expected to remain challenging through at least the first half of next year, she said.”