The Preqin study, released today, found that the quarterly deal flow varied over the 10-quarter period from about 60 to almost 100, with a spike of dollars allocated in the first quarter of 2011, when Facebook raised $1.5 billion and Zynga brought in $485 million.

Marc Andreessen was great at browsers, but when it came to social networks, he was no Mark Zuckerberg. The Netscape founder-turned VC has sold Ning, the social networking company he co-founded, to Glam Media at a price that is reportedly about 20% of what the company was valued at just three years ago. Andreessen’s prior [...]

Facebook and Google+ are in the midst of the great social race. They’re gobbling up small startups that will enhance their offerings (such as facial- and voice-recognition software) as the latest Google offering looks to take its one-time target out for good.

Heck, Facebook was obviously so threatened by Google+ that it went out and tried to surreptitiously smear its newest, biggest competitor since Myspace with a plan that backfired with embarrassing results. Judging by the ovation Google+ was met with, Facebook’s concerns were reasonable.

Now, we’ll watch over the next 24 months as each of these Internet titans slug it out

So now we know how much LinkedIn is worth in today’s frenzied market for social Internet stocks. What does this say about online cousin Facebook? It actually offers several valuable data points, and suggests the king of social networking could receive a market cap ranging from $50 billion to $80 billion as a public company. [...]

Bill Nguyen, a serial entrepreneur who sold his last company to Apple, has launched a new social network in which users share photos with their smartphones. The company, called Color, has $41 million in venture backing. It initially raised $14 million in seed funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank last September. Sequoia [...]