Facebook enters 2011 with a cash infusion almost sure to boost it alongside America’s elite club of the most valuable companies: the likes of Visa & American Express.

Goldman Sachs and Russian partner Digital Sky Technologies invested roughly $500 million in the social-networking site within the past few days, according to reports from The New York Times and confirmed by USA TODAY.

That infusion is the latest deal to peg Facebook’s market value at around $50 billion, a level just 55 publicly traded companies in the U.S. currently meet or exceed. Facebook’s valuation tops that of Nike, eBay and Time Warner.

Unlike nearly all the other $50 billion-plus companies, Facebook was founded only seven years ago. Even 13-year-old Google, valued at $190 billion, looks like an old-timer next to Facebook. Facebook and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Facebook continues to be one of the most popular sites on the Internet, with 500 million users, says market researcher ComScore. Investors hope Facebook will give companies a powerful way to target online advertising to engaged users, says Lou Kerner, analyst at investment firm Wedbush.

Goldman’s investment isn’t the first to place a $50 billion value on Facebook. The company was valued at $56 billion on Dec. 17 after a private online marketplace, SharesPost, conducted an auction in which 165,000 shares traded for $25 each, says SharesPost CEO David Weir.

Most investors, though, do not qualify for such trading because of net worth and income requirements. Facebook shares are not available on a major stock exchange, and it has thus far avoided going public through an initial public offering. Regulators, though, require large companies to register their stock and provide financial statements once they have 500 or more shareholders.

Facebook is a private company, so financial statements are not publicly available. But if reports of the company’s revenue being $2 billion last year are correct, investors are paying 25 times revenue, well above the seven times revenue Google trades for, says Ira Cohen, managing director for investment banking firm Signal Hill.

That means Facebook must meet high expectations for investors to make money. “The history of companies with extremely high valuations is that upside is limited,” says Jay Ritter, professor of finance at the University of Florida.

Facebook rolled out a revamped messaging platform yesterday that may change how millions of people use e-mail, plus intensify the company’s efforts to pry Web users and advertising dollars from rivals led by Google.
The new service is part of “a titanic war,” says Matt Cain, an analyst at research firm Gartner.

Facebook began to offer a few thousand U.S. members an e-mail address that consists of their user name followed by @facebook.com. It will take a few months to make it available to all of the social-networking giant’s 500 million members. Very interesting. Google, Facebook and Apple are leading the way to the future. Who’s going to be the 4thn and 5th forward thinking powerhouse? Let us know…

Would you buy a Facebook phone? We hear that the social networking giant is developing a cellphone, with help from certain partners.

Facebook has flat-out denied the rumor, which cites unnamed sources. Spokesman Jaime Schopflin tells CNET that “Facebook is not developing a phone.”

But then CNET, turning to unnamed sources of its own, confirmed that, yes, Facebook is developing a phone.

The main question is who would buy a Facebook phone?

Rasmus Andersson, the chief designer behind Spotify, Europe’s extremely popular cloud-based music service, is exiting the company to join Facebook. Is the social network planning to create a similar music service?

We feel this would be a great idea, as Myspace is pretty much over and and there needs to be something other than iTunes out there for sure.

Andersson will join Facebook as a product designer in October at their San Francisco headquarters. There, according to a June post on his personal blog which surfaced today, he’s looking to go on a journey of innovation and design, and hints that music will be a part of that voyage:

I believe Facebook is a very interesting entity which is changing the way we look at the internet in large — I’m thrilled and very happy to become a part of that. For me, working with basic human needs (music, social interaction, etc) in an aspect where peoples lives are being improved, has always been the focus of my professional life, thus both Spotify and now Facebook.

Will he bring music and social interaction to Facebook now? Hopefully yes. And it wouldn’t be the first time. Several months ago, Andersson announced a similar combination of music and social networking on Spotify. “We have introduced the oh so familiar concept of friends & followers,” he wrote, “mainly based on Facebook Connect.” That next-gen version of Spotify was pretty sleek. Just imagine an iTunes/Facebook mix, where to share a song, you’d just have to drag the track onto a friend’s name for he or she to receive it.

Take all your social media streams like Facebook and Twitter, flow them into a daring, dynamic iPad magazine and you have Flipboard. Billed as “everything you care about in one place”

[iTunes - Free]

Glam pop singer Lady Gaga is the first living person to have 10 million fans on a single social networking site, having already overtaken President Obama on Facebook.

Facebook looks like it joining the growing list of sites that are now providing HTML5 video for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad compatible playback. The list now includes YouTube and Vimeo, TED, Brightcove (with powered sites such as New York Times and Time Magazine, CBS.com (in trial form))

Good news for us and for Apple, although not great news for Adobe on the video front. Looks like Flash is gonna go. I never liked Flash anyway.

Facebook’s growth is, as we already know, massive. And countries with the fastest membership growth rate are in South America, and Asia. So Question: Is Facebook becoming THE global phone book?