The majority of people who send text messages on Twitter are male, according to a study released by Nielsen Mobile, a mobile market research company.

The study which studied usage of SMS during the fourth quarter of 2008, found that some 57 percent of Twitter users are men, while only 45 percent of users of Predicto, another texting community are male.

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During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

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These days, the more you talk to folks about Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry, the more negative the message is becoming. And for good reason. There’s no more patience. Last time, circa 2001, the entire VC industry got a “get-out-jail-free card” after the Internet bubble burst. That’s because the scores of new firms created in the late 1990s argued they should be forgiven for any poor performance–it was the bubble’s fault, and everyone was affected. Their investors–chief among them, the elite university endowments–agreed, and gave the VC firms more money to invest again. With most VC funds lasting for 10 years, this ensured the VCs a very long life indeed.

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Has news site Digg really made no progress in two years?

That’s what you’d have to conclude from the value investors are placing on Digg after its most recent investment: $164 million.

You’ll remember the hyped Business Week article from more than two years ago that reported “people in the know” said the company’s value was “easily worth $200 million.” The reference suggested Digg and its investors were hoping to steer perceptions that it was worth at least that much.

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A shakeout in the venture capital industry appeared to take hold in the third quarter of the year, even before the latest decline in the stock market began. And we’ve also learned one more reason why Sequoia Capital may have reacted as quickly as it did with its terrifying R.I.P. message to companies: Sequoia raised more money than any other venture firm in the third quarter.

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Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes says he’ll have a decision on the future of AOL “soon.” That can’t come fast enough for AOL boss Randy Falco, who we’re told is now fuming about the limbo state his company has entered: “When is New York going to sell us?” we’re told he muttered in earshot of his lieutenants recently.

Meanwhile, Matt Marshall at Venturebeat doesn’t have a timeline, but he does have a theory about who’s going to buy the company: Both Yahoo and Microsoft. Matt’s scenario, which he says Microsoft is “quietly readying” (according to “sources close to AOL”): Yahoo snaps up AOL, then Microsoft buys both companies.

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TheFunded, a site that lets entrepreneurs rate and comment about venture capitalists, has drawn a lot of attention from folks eager to learn salacious gossip about bad VCs.

Over recent months, though, there’s been an odd development: Certain posts by entrepreneurs critical of VCs are being quietly removed and then replaced with more favorable comments. On its face, it looks like a whitewash. Or maybe it’s not so troubling. You decide.

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Clouds are gathering over Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet companies. The sale of social-networking company Bebo comes at a time when private investors are changing their tune. They’re no longer pumping money into start-ups at the same huge valuations they were doing last year.

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Silver Lake Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., buyout firm that bought Seagate, Flextronics, Gartner and other companies before turning them around, has finished raising its third fund at $9.3 billion in capital, according to LBO Wire. It’s much larger than the firm’s previous fund, raised in 2004, of $3.6 billion.

The pace at which the private equity industry keeps raising money is astonishing. The amount of capital swashing around among the world’s investors is huge, and these investors have little choice but to earmark it for various asset classes, such as stocks, bonds and alternative investments–including private equity.

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TheFunded, the site that lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists, has just unveiled a new feature that could bring a whole new level of transparency to the cloaked world of financing deals. It now lets entrepreneurs submit the terms of their funding deals to the site, so that other entrepreneurs can see them–and make sure they’re not getting a raw deal for their own company. Until now, this sort of resource hasn’t been made available. VentureBeat got an early look at the new feature yesterday.

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Every time we hear from one of the numerous Chinese video sites, they compare themselves to YouTube in its early days. But a closer look at the data suggests the video phenom in China just isn’t comparable.

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