Sometime in the past week, Facebook flipped the switch on allowing you to add your unborn baby to your list of family members via the “Expected: Child” option on Facebook profiles. Apparently too many parents were creating “illegal” fake profiles for their yet unhatched offspring — setting their fake babies’ ages to 13 instead of negative whatever, the minimum Facebook allows. Also, you can’t ask for a better customer acquisition strategy than getting them hooked while they’re still in the womb!

tl;dr version:
If you’re an entrepreneur or VC or will be working in this industry - buy this. read it. live it.

It’s written by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson. They know what they’re talking about. It’s important information that you need to avoid “information asymmetry” with VCs

Some big lessons I’ve learned over the years about term sheets:
1) the language never says anything remotely like “blocking rights” or “participating preferred liquidation preferences” in the term sheets. It’s hidden in legal language. You need to understand them.
2) lawyers seldom walk you through the “how can this term be used against you” scenarios. If you don’t know the right questions to ask you may be left unawares.
3) VCs are anal about things like voting thresholds, seniority of their stock, protective provisions, etc. Entrepreneurs never seem to focus on anything other than ownership percentage.

Brad & Jason’s book, Venture Deals, will arm you. Read on for more details …

I recently wrote a post about the open nature of Twitter and why I’m long on its future. I know it’s easier to write “horse race” stories about who’s signing up more users, raising more funding or who’s “hot” lately. But something more nuanced is at hand that is worth debating – is the future of the Internet & global communications more open or more closed.

Twitter is open. No, not just the fact that you Tweet publicly versus privately, but they’re open in letting their Tweet stream flow into other products & services. They’re an open feed. It is open also in the same way that Google is open. Google started as a place where you came to be taken via links to other people’s websites. I know many of you don’t remember the context, but that was heresy when Google started. Google was duuumb. Sending traffic to other websites, ha!

The rule of thumb then was “stickiness” – remember that? Get people to your website and never let them leave. Clooosed. That’s what AOL was. A “walled garden.” This article will argue that openness is an under-valued virtue in technology & politics but that with patience wins in the end. Read more to find out why …

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable

Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics. These were good packages in the pre social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic.

Today they’re wrong. Terribly wrong. And figuring out who is referring your traffic is a very important part of determining how you allocate your marketing budgets. It is almost certain that Twitter is driving much more of your referrals than you think.

Possibly up to 4x more. Marketers and web companies need to understand this.

awe.sm, the social media analytics company, has crunched some numbers for you. Here’s more details …