Brown, who had helped negotiate many of Facebook’s so-called “talent acquisitions” is to be Twitter’s director of corporate development and will report to Kevin Thau, VP of business development. He starts today, Twitter confirmed.

While the issue of insider trading of private companies is a sensitive one, Twitter was apparently able to see Brown’s side of the story.

Brown had purchased Facebook shares on the secondary market last fall out of an apparent desire to take a bigger stake in the company he pitched to many entrepreneurs. Facebook fired him in February based on its policy against insider trading by employees.

Brown stayed out of the spotlight until a report about him surfaced that suggested the stock purchase for which he was fired was based on knowledge of Facebook’s coming $1.5 billion funding round from Goldman Sachs. In a public statement, Brown admitted to the stock purchase but said he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the Goldman Sachs funding.

According to sources, Brown had also been in talks with Google about a role on its corporate development team before accepting the job at Twitter. After Brown was fired, Facebook hired Google corp dev executive Amin Zoufonoun.

That Twitter is hiring Brown presumably means it will step up its efforts to make acquisitions. The company has previously made something like seven start-up purchases, most of them quite small, including Summize, Mixer Labs, Atebits and Smallthought Systems.

It’s also notable that Brown has jumped to Twitter, given it is one of Facebook’s main rivals. (According to LinkedIn, there are 11 former Facebook employees who currently work at Twitter.)

Brown (like many other new Twitter hires, in our experience!) has recently stepped up his tweeting, with eight tweets in the last month or so compared to zero in the year before. He tweets at @mikeisbrown.

Prior to joining Facebook in 2009, Brown had been a venture capitalist with Foundation Capital and Partech International. He is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

PeerPong “wound down just this past month,” Choy told NetworkEffect, and a couple other members of the PeerPong team joined Formspring as well. To be clear, Formspring did not acquire PeerPong, but at least three of its employees moved over together.

TechCrunch reported Choy’s hiring today, but glossed over the mention of PeerPong. Choy said PeerPong had six employees before it closed.

A cached message from the PeerPong home page reads:

We’re Sorry, but PeerPong is in end of life mode.

When we launched Peerpong.com in early 2010 we believed we could use advanced semantic technology to let people access expertise across social media. We succeeded in finding and indexing over five million people by their knowledge and expertise whether on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, and helped answer questions from hundreds of thousands of users from these ridiculously smart people over the last year.

Unfortunately we find ourselves in a tough position where the service alone can’t support our business goals and sadly need to discontinue the site. I want to thank everyone who committed their time and effort to Peerpong, including the many members who had great answers for all types of questions, from technology to food to dating, and to the Peerpong team directly for the many months trying to unite NLP/semantics with an engaging user experience. There’s no pithy comment to summarize the experience of trying to make something incredible and falling short, only deep gratitude and few, but significant regrets.

Ro Choy – CEO

PeerPong had raised $2.8 million from Partech International, DCM, First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures after being incubated at Partech under the name Muchobene. PeerPong, which Choy joined as CEO in January 2010 after leaving social app maker RockYou, promised to help connect users to subject matter experts through social media.

Earlier this year, PeerPong was experimenting with a so-called pivot to offer a new service called Rendezvous that would have semantically analyzed users’ Facebook profiles to find events and people they might be interested in. But that didn’t work out either.

Formspring, meanwhile, says that as of this week users of its service will have submitted three billion answers to each other’s questions.

Yet another Web 2.0 wunderkind got itself more shelter from the economic storm–widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures.

The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million from investors, including DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International and Sequoia Capital.

It is unclear if the company’s valuation is at the previous $400 million level or not.

In a video interview with BoomTown on Friday (see below), the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the money would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, including onto Xiaonei, one of China’s largest social-networking sites.

As part of the investment, SoftBank–which has major Web investments all over Asia–and RockYou, the company said in a press release, “will also set up a new joint venture company that will develop widget and application products and services for use on PCs and mobile devices in the Asian market, in particular the Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese markets.”

Well, that’s a horse of a different color, what with most Web 2.0 outfits pulling in their horns of late.

Indeed, RockYou said it would also use the money to open offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit and look at making some opportunistic acquisitions, as well as adding to its advertising sales force and developing more brand and vertical channels.

The company’s NYC sales office, previously a one-man shop, is expanding, adds MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka. It hired two people since August and still has one position open and plenty of applicants, says sales boss Paul van de Kamp.

Why all the frenetic activity from RockYou, which says it had over 100 million monthly uniques with over eight billion page views from its popular third-party applications like Super Wall?

Well, a few good reasons, such as: the need to keep up with its key competitor, Slide, which raised its own huge war chest; to find new audiences away from the two top social-networking site, Facebook and MySpace, from which it gets most of its traffic; to improve its products, in order to get better ad rates; and, most of all, to weather the current econalypse in the ad sector.

While RockYou’s execs believe the ad market for widgets and social networking is on the rise in comparison to other kinds of media, it will still be a glum outlook for everyone for a while.

Tokuda and Shen talk about that, as well as the investment, in the video here, and below that is a video I did a year ago with the pair:

RockYou, widget maker, is the latest example of a sane valuation heartbreaker, as it is undertaking efforts to secure an investment from mainstream financing firms that would value the company at between $300 million and $400 million.

First reported by Valleywag last night, the start-up, said one source, “is being squired around Wall Street” by investment behemoth Morgan Stanley (MS), in search of the same kind of deal its rival Slide got in January.

BoomTown broke the news of that deal, which nabbed Slide $50 million and a $550 million valuation with investments from blue-chip investors T. Rowe Price (TROW) and Fidelity.

Thus, RockYou’s motto: Anything Slide can do, we can do slightly smaller!

And, indeed, not to be SuperPoked by Slide CEO and Founder Max Levchin, sources said RockYou Co-Founders Jai Shen (also CTO) and Lance Tokuda (CEO) were quickly on the march for their own payday.

It is, in fact, a quest that a lot of Web 2.0 companies seem to be on, since the sector’s fearless leader–Facebook–got its $240 million and $15 billion valuation from Microsoft (MSFT) last year.

All of this frantic funding activity is, of course, this bubble’s version of going public–grab big cash investments from investment firms and hedge funds, desperate for a good bet on the sector, without the pain of public scrutiny of questionable business prospects that did in Web 1.0 shooting stars.

It’s that or get bought for an ungodly sum by equally desperate Web 1.0 companies (See: AOL+Bebo).

Sources close to RockYou, which has had acquisition feelers put out to it from larger companies in the past, said the company has had several strong offers of funding, but it is trying to select the right partners for the latest round of funding.

“We want our investors to be strategic and helpful to the company,” said one person close to RockYou.

RockYou has so far been funded by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Partech International.

(Interestingly, Sequoia backs another instant messaging and chat widget maker, Meebo, which is reportedly seeking a $250 million valuation, which I posted about here yesterday).

To be fair, makers of highly distributed third-party apps like RockYou are garnering immense traffic and their widgets are syndicated everywhere. RockYou’s Super Wall, which lets you turbocharge your digital wall, for example, is one of the most popular on Facebook.

Other RockYou apps include: X Me, a communications tool that allows you to “Hug Her, Slap Him, Tickle Them!”; and Likeness, where you can “compare yourself with friends and movie stars like Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley and many more.”

The company has been trying to monetize all this traffic and popularity and distribution, as well as knowledge of user behavior, by offering advertisers new forms of engagement.

But the jury is still out on these interesting but unproven efforts by all the social-networking players.

In any case, the money is apparently still flowing into these start-ups, taking a chance on them being the next big media play.

Here are two videos I made when I visited RockYou’s offices in San Mateo, Calif., last October, after I had called the widget market juvenile and faddish.

The first is my tour of the office, where I was playfully accosted by an infant–oops, a RockYou engineer–in a suit. The second is my interview with Shen and Tokuda.

After my visit to Netvibes, I also went over to another cool Web company here that I have been following for a while: Dailymotion.

Based in Paris and funded with $32 million from Atlas Venture and Partech International, the video-sharing site positions itself these days as kind of an anti-YouTube–better at programming, easier to use with new tools for both user-generated and more professional content and more vigilant about copyright protection.

In fact, big media companies–like YouTube-suing Viacom–have singled out Dailymotion as an online video site they can do business with, even as they are also launching premium sites of their own.

But, obviously, offering premium fare from media giants is not Dailymotion’s main aim. Unusual videos are and, indeed, the fare on the site is a step up from typical cats-on-skateboards videos. Today, for example, there’s a cool video on skydiving in the Maldives.

Still, while popular in France, where it really counts at this point–the United States–Dailymotion obviously lags way behind YouTube in traffic. Nonetheless, it is not doing badly compared to other similar sites.

According to a report this summer from comScore:

Dailymotion.com has taken hold in the U.S., drawing more than 4.7 million video streamers in April. The average video streamer at Dailymotion.com viewed more than 10 videos and nearly one hour of video content in the month. Metacafe.com also generated substantial activity, as 3.7 million streamers viewed 33 million video streams, while Break.com saw 3.1 million streamers view 32 million video streams. Veoh.com, which attracted the smallest video-viewing audience of the group, had the highest level of user engagement with more than 104 minutes per streamer, benefiting from the many full-length videos hosted on the site.”

In any case, as these sites sort out their business plans–which YouTube is also still doing–to figure out a way to make money from advertising, here’s a chat I had with Dailymotion co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Bejbaum:

(I am still having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded this to Dailymotion, which is a nifty player anyway.)

Please see this disclosure related to me and YouTube (owned by Google).

So I recently ventured into the heart of the empire of toddler developers with a visit to the San Mateo, Calif., HQ of RockYou, the super-popular maker of third-party apps on hot social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

I have been on a bit of a grumpy tear of late about the juvenile nature of these widgets, whose use has taken off explosively, as the sites they live on have grown.

I have felt that most of them have been a bit silly, useless and faddish, rather than long-lasting and relevant.

RockYou’s apps, for example, include: Super Wall, with 1.26 million active daily users on Facebook, which allows you to turbocharge your basic posting wall; X Me, a communications app with 706,000 Facebook users, which allows you to “Hug Her, Slap Him, Tickle Them!”; and Likeness, where you can “compare yourself with friends and movie stars like Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Keira Knightley and many more,” which has 611,000 active Facebook users.

Like another widget maker, Slide (I did a post and video on Slide here, as well as a three-part interview with founder Max Levchin too), the start-up has big VC backing. In RockYou’s case, it is funded by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Partech International.

Of course, there are the rumors of big-money buyouts and even IPOs for these developers.

I am not so sure this is a good thing, but I do also believe there is something important going on with companies like RockYou, which could become akin to the major software makers of the past era. If, of course, they grow up a bit first.

Here’s my video of a visit to their office (and here is an accompanying interview with its co-founders Lance Tokuda and Jia Shen), where one employee jokingly played dress-up just like an adult, sporting a suit and tie just for me.

Oh, those crazy kids!