Despite new reports of the funding today, the line of credit from TriplePoint Capital is months-old, and we’ve learned it was used primarily for building out a new warehouse in Louisville, Ky.

According to our sources, who declined to be named, only $5 million of the $15 million has been drawn down from the facility, and it’s one of three lines of credit the company has. The company spokeswoman declined to comment.

The Gilt Groupe is a members-only online retailer focused on luxury brands. It has seen huge success in offering deep discounts on items for short periods of time. More recently, it has set its sights on the local deals business, similar to the businesses being built by Groupon and LivingSocial. It has also expanded into offering luxury travel deals.

Gilt’s local deals site, called “Gilt City,” offers bargains on items ranging from massages to frozen yogurt. So far, it’s launched in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco. It’s going up against two feisty and well-funded competitors: LivingSocial, which just raised $175 million in capital from Amazon, and Groupon, which turned down Google’s $6 billion acquisition bid.

A round of funding raised this summer supported those product rollouts. In total, the company has raised upward of $50 million from investors, including General Atlantic and Matrix Partners.

The line of credit shows that the emerging company still needs additional financing for one-off capital projects as resources are pulled in other directions. A big focus is likely on hiring a local salesforce, which is considered a specialty of Groupon. Still, Gilt Groupe is considered one of the more likely IPO candidates, and has said in the past that it expects to achieve gross revenues of $400 million to $500 million by the end of this calendar year.

Next up is Facebook, which offers aggregated data about trends in the status updates posted by its members, including their activity around major news events and their usage of slang.

The best anecdote from the bit is about a newly popular acronym on Facebook, “HMU.” This comes after Facebook noted in 2009 the growth of the trendy whine “FML. (Explanation: We’ll leave the “F” open to your imagination, but the “ML” stand for “My Life.”) Here’s the whole explanation of HMU by Facebook data scientist Lars Backstrom:

The shorthand for “hit me up” was this year’s biggest surprise. In early 2009, the acronym HMU was virtually unheard of. Only a few posts a day contained HMU, and half of them were probably typos. By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day. The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day–too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year’s list.

However, HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.

In early September, an interesting pattern emerged in how people use HMU. Until that point, it was spreading like wildfire, but was being used with roughly equal frequency throughout the week. In September this changed, as usage rates started going through huge swings from day to day. The reason? Before September the demographic most likely to ask their friends to “HMU” was on summer break and looking to hang out most nights. Then many of these folks headed back to school, and HMU became a weekend-oriented request.

Some notable stats from the Facebook 2010 roundup:

• At key moments in certain games during the World Cup, as many as 50 percent of all new status updates were World Cup-related.
• “Toy Story 3″ was the movie most mentioned in status updates, followed by “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Inception,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Iron Man 2.”
• Mentions of the iPad and iPhone 4 accounted for 25 million total Facebook status updates. (I’m not sure what the total number of status updates for the year was.)
• A day after the Haiti earthquake Facebook was receiving 1,800 posts per minute on the topic.
• Yes, Bieber. People talked about the teenage pop star throughout the year, but the single greatest statused-about Bieber moment was the MTV Video Music Awards.
• Facebook could identify 33 separate activity spikes for when each of the Chilean miners was rescued.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Yes, that Steve Largent. For those who have been in a dead zone for the past two decades, the former Seattle Seahawks wide receiver went on to become a congressman and has spent the last seven years heading up the wireless industry’s trade association–a 90-person group with an annual budget of nearly $50 million.

It was a fun talk, though he did deflect some of the more divisive questions, including whether the carriers’ differing definitions of 4G is leading to customer confusion. In general, though, Largent showed the same soft hands he had during all those years on the gridiron.

Largent began by talking about his top priorities (spectrum, spectrum and more spectrum, plus a need for no new wireless taxes) and then I jumped in. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk:

On the need for more spectrum: It really is the lifeblood of the industry. It fuels the virtuous cycle….We’ll work with any interested party to get more spectrum. It really is the most critical element to the service that we provide.

What a lot of people forget about is how long the process takes to get spectrum to the marketplace. The last two spectrum auctions that we had took somewhere between eight and 11 years to come to market. We simply can’t wait that long. The FCC and the president called for 500 MHz in the next 10 years and 300 MHz of that in the next five years. That is a laudible goal. We’re seeing if we can’t even get more spectrum and get it quicker.

That really is priority 1, 2 and 3 for us as a trade association. It has been this year and it will be until we see that spectrum auctioned.

(Largent then went on to talk about the group’s actual No. 2 and No. 3 priorities, which I will summarize. No. 2 is to keep downward pressure on taxes, such as pushing for a five-year ban on new wireless taxes. No. 3 is all the warm-fuzzy stuff like environmental friendliness and those commercials that tell you to hang up and drive.)

Mobilized: Your organization opposes the extension of net neutrality into wireless broadband. Won’t this eventually mean the end of net neutrality as a whole since everything is heading wireless?

Largent: To me, this all goes back to the first point I was making and that’s this spectrum issue. The reason wireless is unique is because of the limited amount of spectrum we have today. To alleviate that, we have to have more spectrum and the more spectrum we have, the more services we have and the necessity of managing our network becomes less severe.

Until we get to that point–and we are not there yet–we have to have the ability to manage our network. If we don’t, you could have 911 calls blocked or people’s calls from their kids in college blocked or emergency alerts blocked and that’s not the system anyone wants to see.

You’ve been at the group since 2003, so you have seen some generation shifts. How would you say the 3G to 4G transition is going, relative to past transitions?

I think it is going very well. I think it is actually going faster. This is a quantum leap, going from 3G to 4G, and it takes an incredible amount of investment. We’ve seen the first of the 4G technologies with Sprint. We see Verizon coming on very quickly this year. AT&T is following closely on their heels. T-Mobile, they have some real spectrum constraints and yet they are coming on very quickly as well.

What do you make of the fact that different companies are using different definitions of 4G. Do you think there is some risk that if your members don’t use that term to mean the same thing that consumers won’t understand the benefits of true 4G?

No. What I would tell you is this is a highly competitive marketplace. What these individual companies do in terms of marketing their plans for 4G and their services and how quickly they are available to customers, that’s a competitive practice and a competitive field. I’m not going to weigh in on that. That’s a place I am not going to go.

Obviously wireless is one of the most competitive areas, with customers looking for new services and devices every couple of years, and a lot of money is spent driving to retain and attract new users. It seems like attacks have gotten sharper in the past few years. Do you think there is more energy going into attacks, or is that just the way the game is played?

There’s a lot of sharp elbows in any competitive industry like ours and that’s not something I am embarrassed about. I’m actually very proud of the fact of how competitive our carriers are with each other. It goes beyond the carriers to handset makers to application providers. There is a lot of competition going on in this space.

The other thing to look at is the amount of money that they are spending to advertise their services. I think three of our four carriers are in the top ten of advertising. It’s very competitive, and those elbows do get sharp.

Since, I’m new to the wireless beat, I asked some of my colleagues to come up with some good, topical questions. Here’s what one came back with: The 1983 playoff win against the Dolphins was one of the most exciting and surprising games ever played. Do you agree?

I can tell you that 1983 was when this trade association came into existence….That game was very exciting–Dan Marino was a rookie that year.

Participation in the program is free and voluntary for companies, which would need to set up company profile pages and add products to be reviewed before users could leave a recommendation. The program has some 30 participating companies at launch, including JetBlue, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft Corp. and Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Participating companies will be able to review the recommendations, respond to them, and possibly delete frivolous ones, LinkedIn said.

The closely held company has in recent months been adding new functionality to its website to become a hub for the information that professionals need to do their jobs. “A big part of what we’re working to do is becoming the essential source of information for our membership,” said LinkedIn Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner.

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Chief Executive David Wei said the company remains confident it will deliver strong revenue growth this year and “a big profit” in 2011 because of the three-year investment plan it launched in 2009. Europe’s debt crisis has no impact on Alibaba.com’s customers, and Chinese exporters and their customers will post growth this year, he said.

Net profit for the three months ended March 31 was 330.0 million yuan ($48.3 million), up from 246.7 million yuan a year earlier and above the average 284.3 million yuan forecast of six analysts.

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“Facebook, in some ways, is about what people are up to,” Jonathan Miller said during a keynote speech at the ad:tech conference in New York. MySpace, in contrast, “is about what people are into.”

MySpace in recent months has said it plans to focus on its appeal as an entertainment portal, where members can connect with their favorite bands and artists, as it has lost ground to status- and news-feed-heavy Facebook.

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An interesting variation on the “membership drive” and one that’s gotten Tagged in hot water with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, who intends to sue the company “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy.”

“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged’s unethical–and illegal–behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Tagged, for its part, claims this is all just a big misunderstanding. In a statement of its own, the company denied abusing its users’ personal address books, saying, essentially, it had their consent to do so.

“When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our ‘invite your friends’ language was confusing,” said Tagged CEO Greg Tseng. “…In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends.”

Oh, and next time you register for a social network, be sure to read its Terms of Service–especially the portions that are presented in ALL CAPS. They might be important. From Tagged’s Terms of Service:

“E) Notice Regarding Commercial Email

MEMBERS CONSENT TO RECEIVE COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES FROM TAGGED, AND ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED BY TAGGED FOR THE PURPOSE OF INITIATING COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES.”

An interesting variation on the “membership drive” and one that’s gotten Tagged in hot water with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, who intends to sue the company “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy.”

“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged’s unethical–and illegal–behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Tagged, for its part, claims this is all just a big misunderstanding. In a statement of its own, the company denied abusing its users’ personal address books, saying, essentially, it had their consent to do so.

“When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our ‘invite your friends’ language was confusing,” said Tagged CEO Greg Tseng. “…In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends.”

Oh, and next time you register for a social network, be sure to read its Terms of Service–especially the portions that are presented in ALL CAPS. They might be important. From Tagged’s Terms of Service:

“E) Notice Regarding Commercial Email

MEMBERS CONSENT TO RECEIVE COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES FROM TAGGED, AND ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED BY TAGGED FOR THE PURPOSE OF INITIATING COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES.”

Tomorrow, however, leading researchers in online child safety are expected to submit a report to the attorneys general stating that age verification technology is flawed and will not protect children from online dangers.

Following are excerpts of separate interviews with Attorney Generals Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who led the charge for social-networking safety standards.

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