Film clip aggregator Movieclips.com has raised $18.5 million in a third funding round led by U.S. Venture Partners. The start-up is changing its name to Zefr, and adding sports, television and music videos to its content network. Whatever its name, the company already raised $10 million from lead venture firms, Shasta Ventures, MK Capital and First Round Capital, for its curation efforts. “The company said it now has 600 million monthly views, 25,000 movie clips and three billion total lifetime views on YouTube,” reports AllThingsD. 

Shares of Facebook hit a new intra-day low of $19.76 on Thursday as preferred shareholders got their first chance to dump the stock. Yes, “Facebook's life as a public company has been a nightmare from day one, and the pain continued on Thursday,” writes CNNMoney.com. Worse yet, an even bigger Facebook stock dump could come in November when the company is expected to convert the special form of restricted stock units, or RSUs, held by most of its staff into actual shares of stock. 

We doubt it will discourage mobile usage, but a federal appeals court has decided that authorities do not need a probable-cause warrant to track suspects’ via their mobile devices. As Wired reports: “The decision, a big boost for the government’s surveillance powers, comes as prosecutors are shifting their focus to warrantless cell-tower location tracking of suspects in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in January sharply limiting the use of GPS vehicle trackers.”  

Separate and apart from Medium, Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone debuted another online platform, this week. Named Branch, the site encourages users to start longer, more in-depth conversations about specific topics, and then invite others to join in on the discussion. “Sometimes, 140 characters just isn’t enough,” The New York Times Bit’s blog jokes, referring to Twitter’s famous character limitations.   

Facebook just debuted a new "Life Event" for Timeline, which lets users share when they are expecting the latest addition to their family. With the new event option, users can share their baby's due date, whether it's a boy or a girl, details like who the other parent is, a location, and a story about the pregnancy. Meanwhile, as PCMag points out, those who aren't so keen on babies have a new option, too. “A Chrome plugin called ‘Unbaby Me’ will search your Facebook feed for mentions of babies and replace them with photos of cats.”

Out to create a more informed, empowered app consumer, a new service is offering app ratings, and simple “terms of service” summarizations. Named TOS;DR, the project debuted about a year ago as an outgrowth of the Unhosted project, which, as TechCrunch reports, is a system for building Web apps that leave users in control of their data. The founders say they were inspired in part by Creative Commons, which provides plain English summaries of each license it offers.

Contrary to what some Web watchers think, App.net is much more than a Twitter clone, which (if and when it ever launched) will run on subscriptions rather than advertising. Rather, “What the service really wants to be is a central messaging bus and open ecosystem for the social web,” according to GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram. That said, “It remains to be seen whether enough users and developers will be willing to pay for the service to make it an effective resource — especially since similar efforts to create an open ecosystem for the social web have mostly failed.”

Ahead of its third-quarterly report as a public company, Groupon is facing new questions about its business model, and inability to retain sales people. “Any issues with its sales force are troublesome for Groupon, since salespeople form the backbone of the company,” The Wall Street Journal writes. According to WSJ, about 45% of the company's more than 12,000 employees are in sales, and they are responsible for signing up local businesses to offer daily deals and other products.      

Can a little-known upstart disrupt Twitter and its microblogging empire? It will be a long road to hoe, but App.net founder Dalton Caldwell is betting that a friendlier environment for developers -- and a burst of media and industry buzz -- can do the trick. “It will be an interesting experiment,” Forbes writes. “The challenge will be to build a large enough network to be useful. Being paid, it will never achieve the scale of Facebook or Twitter, but Caldwell is less concerned about scale than he is about building trust with users and developers.”    

The New York Times takes a closer look at “big data,” and why it  -- “as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool” -- is having such a big year. “The Big Data story is the making of a meme,” NYT writes, explaining that the term’s success is likely due to its simplicity, along with its mystique and promise as a cure for modern information overload. As one computer scientist tells NYT: “Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything.”