President Barrack Obama and Facebook, plus numerous other companies, have formed the StartUp America Partnership to stimulate economic growth by fostering technology entrepreneurs.

The initiative was announced this morning via a livestream on Facebook, and you can watch a recording of it here. Chaired by AOL founder Steve Case, the partnership will be privately funded but bring together players from both the public and private sector, including Facebook, Intel, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

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While The Social Network may have been a fictionalized history of Facebook, other movies are trying to capitalize on the social network’s popularity including an upcoming Adam Sandler movie.

As Ryan Spoon pointed out to us yesterday afternoon, Just Go With It, integrates Facebook into the  entire movie trailer, including a mention of the movie’s Facebook Page. While I’m sure a hot girl plus Adam Sandler, plus some social network references can sell tickets for a movie, I’m not sure how big of a role, if any, Facebook plays within the film itself. It’s definitely an interesting use of Facebook. Check out the complete trailer below

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MySpace may be looking to reduce its staff significantly, as multiple sources claim the social network is planning significant layoffs that could affect up to 50% of its employees.

Sources close to the situation have told All Things Digital that management is in the midst of figuring out more drastic cost-cutting measures that owner News Corp. asked for in the wake of MySpace’s decreased revenue and traffic. These possible layoffs, which have yet to be determined, could affect employees located outside the U.S. MySpace has declined to comment on the subject at this time.

This rumor comes not too long after MySpace made significant efforts to revamp its image. October saw the beginnings of a new era for MySpace, when the site announced its intentions to become more of a leading entertainment hub “socially powered by the passions of fans and curators” instead of being a “place for friends.” Earlier this month, the Hijacks program was introduced, allowing certain celebrities — like the Black Eyed Peas and Jack Black — to “take over” the site for short periods of time. And last month, MySpace partnered up with Facebook, making it possible for users to log in with Facebook.

But it seems these changes haven’t done much to improve MySpace’s fortunes, and News Corp. bigwigs might not expect a significant turnaround to happen. There are rumors that MySpace will get sold off . As of now, it only looks like we’ll start seeing if there’s some truth to any of this speculation in the new year.

Many people have never heard of myYearbook, a social network that skews pretty young (half of its members are teenagers). But it’s got a substantial audience, with around 55.7 million visits  and 4.3 million uniques a month, according to comScore. And recently, it’s been growing very quickly —  according to comScore, unique visits are up 23% since last November, and page views are up a whopping 83% over the same time frame, to 998 million. Earlier this week, I sat down with CEO Geoff Cook to talk about what’s driving the growth.

The key, Cook says, is a feature that launched in November called Chatter (which has no relation to the Salesforce feature by the same name). Chatter is a lot like Facebook’s News Feed — it’s a stream of content recently posted by other users on the network. But unlike Facebook, which populates your feed with items from your friends, Chatter is geared more towards meeting and interacting with people you don’t know. Cook says one contributor to the feature’s popularity is the fact that you can filter what type of items you’re seeing — for example, I could elect to see only content posted by women aged 20-30 (for this reason, the site has a more flirty nature than what you’ll find on Facebook). That’s helped the feature catch on, and Chatter is now seeing 1 million user updates a day.

To help boost engagement, myYearbook has borrowed features popular on other sites and incorporated them into Chatter. First, the site added Ask Me, which is a Q&A feature very similar to Formspring.me. It then added ‘Rate Me’, which lets you post a photo and have it rated by strangers (which sounds like a recipe for low self esteem, but Cook claims that people receive quite a few ’10’s). The site also plans to add a feature called ‘2 Truths & A Lie’, which is an online version of the classic game.

Some of the site’s growth — the boost in unique users, in particular — is likely due to the fact that myYearbook now syndicates Chatter updates to Twitter, which direct users back to the site. But he says the rise in engagement (page views have jumped from 544 million in November to 998 million in March) is primarily from users interacting more with the site, and it’s driven by Chatter, along with the site’s redesign. Cook also points out that according to comScore, myYearbook has more page views than Twitter.com does in the United States (though he concedes that much of Twitter’s traffic comes from third party clients, and Twitter has a large international audience).

Looking forward, Cook says that the company will soon be launching applications for both the iPhone and Android.

Here’s a video the site is using to promote its recent growth;