Media Converged, a division of Qwasi Inc.

Mashable: Want a live look at voting patterns across the United States this Election Day? Facebook and Foursquare both have real-time maps of polling place check-ins across the country, broken down by state.

Facebook’s map runs on autopilot: Load it up, sit and watch, almost like an iTunes visualization. Blue dots show a polling place check-in, while a counter above tallies the total check-ins. The map can also be switched into an impressive full-screen view.

Mashable: If you can’t stop yourself from buying accessories, clothes, handbags, apartment decor and recipe ingredients after seeing them all in pins, you’re not alone.

A recent survey of 7,431 online shoppers, conducted by BizRate Insights, reveals Pinterest motivates more online purchases than Facebook.

Business Insider: We keep hearing that Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ads — the posts from advertisers that appear in your News Feed — are much more effective than Facebook’s regular display (or “MarketPlace”) ads. Sponsored Stories are the only ads that appear on Facebook’s mobile apps, where most of its users are, too.

AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal, one of Facebook’s largest ad buyers, sent us this chart (below), which dovetails neatly with data we published earlier from a rival Facebook client. The chart shows the relative effectiveness of Sponsored Stories vs. Marketplace ads on Facebook. Fazal says, “Since Q1 2012 we have been driving more fans using Sponsored Story ads than regular marketplace/inline like ads for large brands and agencies. This data covers millions of fans we have driven.”

Wall St. Cheat Sheet: Facebook has proposed a $20 million settlement in a class action lawsuit accusing the social network of violating users’ rights with its “Sponsored Stories” advertising feature. The offer was revised upward after a U.S. judge rejected an earlier agreement.

The new settlement agreement, which was filed on Saturday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, drops earlier provisions that would have set aside up to $10 million for plaintiffs lawyers’ fees. It also allows users to apply for a cash payment of up to $10 each.

Adweek: Most brands only have a basic understanding of who their Facebook fans are. They can see gender, age and location breakdowns through Facebook’s Insights tool, but they’re hard-pressed to find out much else, particularly their other interests. Coca-Cola knows its fans like the soda brand, but what about the TV show it sponsors, American Idol? 

A number of social marketing firms like Wildfire, SocialCode and Relevvant have created workarounds—typically asking users to give a brand permission to access their interest graph when they sign up for the brand’s Facebook app—but marketers are limited to that subset of their fans. Well, most marketers are limited.

Financial Times: It is five months since General Motors last spent a cent on Facebook advertising. The US carmaker’s revelation in May that the $10m it spent on ads had failed to deliver returns stunned the social network on the eve of its initial public offering. Facebook is yet to win back the carmaker’s business.

But GM – one of the world’s largest advertisers – is no social-media refusenik. Its brands, such as Chevrolet, Buick and GMC, have been actively buying ads on Facebook’s main challenger, Twitter, for two years now.

PR Newser: You’ve probably heard that Facebook just hit the one billion user milestone. The company celebrated the announcement with a teary-eyed commercial and a typically understated blog post by the Zuck complete with a “one billion fact sheet.”

While the stats on the sheet are fascinating, they also bring attention back to Facebook’s biggest challenge: How can they turn that unbelievably huge data pool into real-world revenue?

Over the past two weeks, the company rolled out two new answers to that question in the form of “promoted ads” and “Facebook Gifts”, its new entry into the rapidly expanding world of digital retail after acquiring the social gifting app Karma. Now users can send their friends a lot more than hearts or Farmland invitations. It’s a bit of a twist on the DOA Facebook Deals plan: interested parties can choose from a list of products to send their friends and, in the most important update, the recipient can specify size, style, color, etc. so the gift best fits his or her individual tastes.