Social Media Digest: Facebook changes, Julpan sale and White House Linkedin

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s a run-down of our top five:

1.  Facebook unveiled big changes yesterday in California, including a  music service that lets you listen to your friends’ music ‘live’ – but so far, this seems to have largely succeeded in goading its 750 million users into a fury. Users have been infuriated by this week’s overhaul of the site – with some likening it to the disastrous update to news site Digg that led to a wave of protest and a spate of resignations. Dozens of Facebook groups have been set up to protest the changes – some with thousands of members.

2. Internet start-up company Julpan, which specializes in sifting important data from blogs and tweets, has been bought by Twitter. Julpan was founded last year by Ori Allon, the Israel-born computer scientist who created a highly-praised “Orion” search engine. Google bought the rights to Orion in 2006 and incorporated it into its technology. Allon worked at Google until leaving to start Julpan. Allon’s latest venture, based in New York, was devoted to insightfully determining in real time what people are sharing with social networking services and tools.

3. President Barack Obama is again turning to a social networking website to host a town hall meeting. The White House says Obama will be in the San Francisco Bay area city of Mountain View on Monday to answer questions. The White House announced the meeting on Tuesday. It did not disclose an exact time for the event but said it will be broadcast live on LinkedIn and the White House’s website.

4. According to a recent blog post from 1000Memories, the company estimates that Facebook currently houses over 140 billion photos uploaded by users, a figure that’s 10,000 times larger than all the photos housed by the Library of Congress. Based off a figure from a Facebook engineer earlier this year, the social network oversees more than 200 million photos uploaded per day, approximately 6 billion per month. Techcrunch also reported that Facebook users uploaded an estimated 750 million photos over the New Year’s holiday earlier this year.

5. We’ve released our Social Media Hall of Fame, which documents what we feel are 50 of the best social media campaigns from around the world. You can read more about them here, but if you think we’ve missed any out, please let us know by emailing social@umpf.co.uk.