This is so brilliant, we’re a bit dumbstruck it didn’t happen sooner. ETrade’s loveable toddler trader spokesperson (the message being it’s so easy to trade online with ETrade that a… right, you got it) is the victim of a spoof ad in which he starts trading in, quite naturally, toxic assets and loses EVERYTHING.

Nobody saw this one coming. Flip video, the darling gadget of mobile journos and digi-documentarians, is dead, shut down by its under-pressure owner Cisco. We are morbidly fascinated here with the death of brands in this era of social networking. The death of Flip is the spookiest we’ve yet seen.

President Barack Obama kicked off his 2012 re-election campaign last week on — where else? — Twitter and Facebook signifying the continued importance of social media in the U.S. presidential elections. Obama has plenty of Facebook and Twitter followers ready to back his campaign a second time around. But where the Obama Facebook account works as a source of inspiration for digitally minded politicians, the Obama campaign this time round falls well short of the rousing “Yes we can!” spirit we’ve seen from his camp in the past.

We’ve given a fair bit of attention here to Google’s new algorithm changes, which reward high-quality sites while punishing the so-called content farms that cut and paste what’s in the news. Last night, Google unveiled the second and final (for now) phase of the “high quality” roll-out that will impact all English-language searches around the world. For anybody who publishes content to the web, the changes are BIG.

SocialFlow operates a social media monitoring platform that focuses on the hot topics that are relevant to clients. From there,delivers for clients targeted social messaging services. it helps that it has unique access to Twitter’s Tweet stream.

LivingSocial is a social commerce service that works on the concept of “group buying” — encouraging users and their friends to buy special deals at, say, restaurants and other local businesses via a daily deals hook.

Launched earlier this year, Chirply maintains an online community of artists and graphic designers, and it crowdsources creative designs from the community for paper-based greeting cards.

What’s hot in social media investment this week? Social commerce, crowdsourced content hubs, apps specialists and, yes, social media monitoring. This week’s freshly funded startups brought in a combined $409.9 million, thanks mainly to SocialLiving’s massive $400 million haul.

Last week we noted the “Facebook effect” on digital advertising after it was reported the social network likely contributed £3 out of every £4 spent on social media marketing in the UK last year. Today, we see the “Facebook effect” holds true for retail too.

It’s not often we get a quarterly financial statement from a privately held firm, but then these are not ordinary times, particularly in the field of social media monitoring/analytics. Who’s the company? The newly funded Visible Technologies, which boasts of a greater-than-doubling of revenues in the first quarter of 2011.