This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.As a business owner, you know your product, service, market and customers. But sometimes one of the most challenging aspects of operating a business is employees.

If some new estimates revealed today are accurate, Facebook could generate between $1 billion and $1.1 billion in revenue this year, a big increase over the $710 million estimate from The Wall Street Journal a few months ago. In fact, the world’s largest social network could have made between $600-$700 million in 2009.The estimation and legwork, performed by Inside Facebook, provides the clearest picture yet into a very hazy topic: Facebook’s finances.

The University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business looked at the relationship between social media and small businesses and found that the technology adoption rates in the U.S. have doubled in the past year from 12% to 24%.The data comes straight from the university’s third installment to its Small Business Success Index report and is based on a December 2009 telephone survey of 500 small business owners.

Companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on you. Information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums and other sites is fair game.

CoTweet, the Twitter CRM tool used by several massive brands including JetBlue and Ford, has been acquired by ExactTarget, an email marketing firm.In a statement, ExactTarget CEO Scott Dorsey said, ”By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all forms of interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”While perhaps not a widely known name in the social media space, ExactTarget is a major player in email marketing, generating $114 million in revenue for 2009.

Adobe Flash has been in the spotlight recently, and not for the right reasons. Now the company has opened up on the the iPad, iPhone and HTML5 debate in an exclusive interview with Mashable.Fewer than two months ago, Apple revealed the iPad to the world. And while the company’s highly anticipated device included a lot of features, Flash wasn’t one of them.A war of words soon erupted over the the multimedia plugin, with Flash responding to Apple and Steve Jobs ranting about Flash, stating that “the world is moving to HTML5.”What does Adobe think of all of this recent talk?

The sharing service ShareThis is familiar to lots of Internet users — thanks to its popular plugin and sharing buttons. Now the service is introducing ShareThis Stream, which adds a real-time and social element to what is being shared by your friends and other ShareThis users all over the web. The ShareThis team explains some of the key new features of the new service.