Digital update: Google hiring, Yahoo firing, Twitter worth $4B

The dominant players in the digital landscape rise and fall like characters in a video game. Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG), which seems to want a slice of every hot space in the digital world, says it plans to hire more than 6,200 employees this year, while Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), has slashed more than 700 from its payroll in the last two months, laying off another 100 to 150 yesterday.

Yahoo was once the very symbol of Internet success, just as the now struggling My Space was a social media leader.

The Yahoo cutbacks came even as the company doubled its earnings in Q4. The company’s revenue fell 12 percent from a year before, however, and its earning gains were largely due to cost-cutting. Some investors have questioned whether CEO Carol Bartz is on the right track and its stock price has suffered (it fell 12 percent Tuesday to $15.64 and was down to $15.50 in mid-morning trading Wednesday).

Bartz, who took the helm at Yahoo in 2009, is halfway through a four-year contract. The company’s downturn began way back in 2006.

Google, on the other hand, while it’s venture into the social networking space with Google Buzz flopped, has entered another red hot space, local social deals. We’re wary of such me-too imitations of other successful digital ventures, but Google’s revenue in Q4 was up 26 percent to $8.4 billion – more than Yahoo’s $6.3 billion for the entire year.

The expansion Google plans this year will be the biggest in its history. The company operates a large data center in Lenior, NC, and a Chapel Hill software development office. The company boosted its workforce by about 4,200 people in 2010 to end the year with 24,400 employees.

But if you’re planning on sending Google an application, you’ll be competing with more than 1 million others who want to work for the search engine giant – and the company is famous for its hiring only the best and brightest as determined by grades, SAT scores and rigorous, mind-bending test questions.

Twitter worth $4 billion

Social media continues to dominate the digital world. Reports from SharesPost, a secondary market that deals in buying and selling privately held company stock, Twitter, which just raised $200 million in funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & byers, , is now valued at $4 billion, up $300 million in a month.

Facebook still rules the social media space though, even if “The Social Network,” the film about its founders, did not lead the Oscar nominations. On the secondary markets, its value soared to $75 billion, following its most recent funding round.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating secondary markets currently to evaluate if they may be violating SEC regulations.