Facebook Roundup: President Obama, Vitrue, Messages, Places, Photos, Events, Causes, Justin Bieber and More

President Obama Meets with Zuckerberg - President Barack Obama made a trip to Silicon Valley this week to meet with leaders in the tech industry, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Vitrue Raises $17 million, Adds Murphy as Senior Advisor - Social media management services provider Vitrue announced a $17 million third round of funding from Scale Venture Partners, Advent Venture Partners, General Catalyst Partners and Dace Ventures. Facebook’s former vice president of global sales, Mike Murphy, has also joined Vitrue to work as a “senior advisor” with CEO Reggie Bradford. Facebook Challenges Relationship Status Patent - Facebook has challenged three separate patents that pertain to relationship statuses as they function on a social graph. This comes as the company has broadened its relationship status options, adding “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.” Facebook Rolls Out New Messages to All Users - Facebook is expanding the new Messages rollout to everyone on Facebook over the new few weeks. We first wrote about Messages in November. Brothers Samwer Sell Facebook Shares - Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, entrepreneurial German brothers who invested in Facebook in 2008 as part of the company’s $15 billion valuation round with Microsoft, sold their shares recently, according to a local report. Given that Facebook recently raised funding at a reported $50 billion to $60 billion valuation, the brothers, may have made up to four times their investment back. Places Beats Out Foursquare, Gowalla by Far - MerchantCircle conducted a survey recently to find that 32% of the business social network’s members were using Places, 9% using Foursquare and 6.6% use Groupon. Facebook’s Pixelcloud is Updated - Facebook’s Engineering team wrote a blog about the redesign of the internal photo sharing service created by employees, Pixelcloud. Fun Facts About Facebook Photos - Pixable, along with Harvard University researchers, conducted some interesting research about Facebook’s photos. Facebook will have 100 billion photos by this summer, women have twice as many looks/uploads/tags as men, men prefer photos with women they don’t know, women prefer photos with women they know and everyone seems to prefer photos of women in general. Older users and younger users upload about the same amount, but older users are not tagged as often. Facebook Changes Events Format - Microformats leader Tantek Celik has announced that that Facebook has changed the way it marks up events to add an hCalendar microformat, marking up venues with an hCard, too. Microformats are a set of open data formats built on existing standards that make it easier for users (and machines) to share information across services; in this case, users will be able to more easily export Facebook events to other calendar programs. Cooliris Receives $9.6M Funding - Cooliris, which allows users to see photos and videos on the web in an easy format, received $9.6 million in Series C funding from several investors, including: DAG Ventures, The Westly Group and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. The company also recently released its LiveShare 1.2 photo sharing app, which allows users to created shared photo streams with their Facebook friends. Causes Used to Connect with Middle East Activists - Causes wrote a post detailing how its users were able to interact with issues related to Tunisia and Egypt. Sharing on Facebook Most Lucrative for E-Commerce - ChompOn released data comparing Twitter and Facebook actions. Turns out Facebook Shares are worth more than Likes, which are worth more than tweets, which are worth more than follows on Twitter. Rosetta Stone Sees Facebook Traffic with Webtrends - Rosetta Stone partnered with Webtrends in order to fine tune its Facebook strategy, resulting in Rosetta Stone being able to cut marketing costs on the platform by $20 per fan with a 10-14% conversion rate. Rosetta Stone now counts a 60% conversion rate at a cost of less than $1.50 per fan, according to a company press release. Facebook, Justin Bieber, Team Up to End Cyberbullying - Facebook, teen pop star Justin Bieber and MTV’s “A Thin Line” show are partnering to end “digital abuse.” According to a press release, Bieber is asking his fans to post an action to stop such abuse on an MTV map, which will enter them into a sweepstakes. Facebook’s Safety Page figures prominently in the campaign.

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Facebook Roundup: President Obama, Vitrue, Messages, Places, Photos, Events, Causes, Justin Bieber and More

Sara Inés Calderón

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Sara Inés Calderón