Instagram is planning to launch video functionality in two days. But don’t go deleting Vine just yet. Before shoving Vine’s into the deadpool, let’s just calm it down a second.

Vine has been declared by many as the “Instagram for Video.” Instagram’s own video product is likely already too late to squash Vine like a bug. Heck, Facebook couldn’t even get Poke and Messenger off the ground after incumbents clobbered the space. What makes anyone think Instagram video would be any different?

Vine launched in January of this year, just after the holidays, and spent a few months ramping up the user base before launching on Android a few weeks ago. At the time, Vine had 13 million downloads. Not too shabby for approximately five months of work. It took Vine a few days to swing to the top of the App Store, and the same was true on Google Play following the Android launch.

When Instagram launched on Android, seventeen months after launching on iOS, it had around 30 million users. Obviously, users are a different metric than downloads, but you can see how Vine’s growth is relatively astounding given the timeframe. Especially when you factor in the less pointed evidence: Vine shares have surpassed Instagram shares on Twitter, for example, or even just hearing the term “Vine it” regularly in every day life. And having Twitter as a parent company doesn’t hurt either.

Vine is already established, and better yet, making waves. Vine was used by the Tribeca Film Festival for a special #6SecFilm Contest. The app has been toyed with by designers and advertisers to build new interactive music videos. Brands love Vine because it lets products move in ways that Twitter and Facebook don’t.

And Vine, of course, is still iterating quickly. We’ve seen the team respond to feature requests like the ability to use front-facing camera as well as rear-facing camera, and I wouldn’t be suprisedt to see interesting additions like Voiceover or Animation pop up soon.

Instagram is a powerful foe. The app has over 100 million users, and is now owned by the most powerful social network in the world. But this is far from the end of Vine.

First, Vine is the end product of what Instagram was built to be. Vine skipped past still photos, and filters to make those photos (taken with bad mobile cameras) look prettier, and the slow grind of adding @mentions and photo maps and all those iterative feature tweaks.

Instead, Vine launched as a true Instagram for video, which now has an active and seemingly happy user base. It’s not Twitter’s Cleaner fish, even if Twitter bought up the app and launched it into existence (unlike Instagram’s organic growth that was later bought up by Facebook).

But where Instagram feels like a consumption app first (a time sink, almost), Vine doesn’t. Scrolling through my Vine stream is like having a hangover during an earthquake. Most often, it’s a lot of clanging and wind noise coupled with shaky video of my friends’ latest vacation.

Still, Vines are excellent content. I am utterly pleased when I see a Vine.co link pop up in my Twitter stream, or surface in someone’s Facebook Timeline. I’m even more elated by a Vine.co link sent to my desktop. I like to watch the six-second thrill ride in all its glory. There’s something special about getting a glimpse (in video no less!) into someone’s world.

Instagram is a different story. There was a time when I could scroll through Instagram for days. I’m not so entranced by the photo-sharing phenom anymore. Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way, but I get a sense of Instagram fatigue, both on the creative and consumptive side.

Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I’m all hopped up on Vine. Maybe Instagram’s had its time?

People like consuming video, sure, but it’s almost shocking how much people love making videos, too. Especially when given the right tools. When I see something cool happening out in the world, Instagram is no longer enough. I pray to the social media gods that this wondrous, hilarious, or downright insane scene before me will last the six seconds I need. I sense how strongly other people feel the same as I do.

Instagram for video might offer a similar creative experience, but it’ll be hard to do so without copying Vine’s ability to string together multiple clips in such an easy manner. Easy is the key. And we all know what happens when Facebook tries to copy a threat. Messenger launched after WhatsApp and Viber were blowing up. Poke launched to (shamefully) combat Snapchat. And here comes Instagram, ready to take on Vine.

But will Vine crumble where other competitors stood firm? Will it lay down and die?

Oh no! Not Vine! Vine will survive.

Stealing a page right out of a startup called Aggregift’s playbook, Amazon today launched a new feature called “Amazon Birthday Gift,” which allows a group of Facebook friends to go in on an Amazon.com Gift Card together. That gift isn’t posted to the recipients’ Facebook Timeline until their big day arrives.

To get started with the service, a user buys an Amazon.com gift card, then invites other mutual friends to donate using the Birthday Gift website here. When the birthday arrives, the recipient is tagged in a Facebook Timeline wall post, receiving the digital card and everyone’s birthday greetings.

The new addition is a further expansion of Amazon’s deepening integration with Facebook, as the company last December launched a “Friends and Family Gifting” feature just ahead of the holidays to generate Facebook-enabled gift suggestions, send out reminders, and enable gift list sharing via both email and social networks. Online competitor Walmart, too, had previously launched a similar Facebook-based gift recommendation service in 2011, which was added to the Walmart.com site ahead of the 2012 holiday season.

Social gifting is still very much in the experimental phase, despite the support from e-commerce giants like Walmart, Amazon and others. For instance, Facebook has also dabbled in this area with the fall 2012 debut of Facebook Gifts (built on top of former social gifting startup Karma). The service is meant to tie into one of Facebook’s most regular draws — its birthday reminders. The idea is that users could visit the site, and in addition to wishing their friend “happy birthday,” they could also add a gift to accompany that message. The social network offers gifts like iTunes digital Gift Cards and physical goods, and it even launched its own self-branded “Facebook Card” earlier this year.

However, even with Facebook’s broad reach, its Gifts service has been struggling to generate serious revenue, and certainly falling short of earlier projections and estimations regarding its potential. Meanwhile, some startups like Sincerely (with Sesame) and recently funded Wrapp, carry on in this space, while others head off in new directions. Giftly, for instance, exited to GiftCards.com this March, while Boomerang has turned its focus to the B2B market instead in recent months.

That being said, Amazon still has a shot at winning the social gifting space with its new Amazon Birthday Gift feature, since it can be argued that users don’t associate Facebook’s brand with spending or shopping the way they do with Amazon. (See also: various f-commerce struggles). Plus, Amazon’s cards are the go-to for the “generic” gift option, which people buy when they don’t know what to get, or when they need something last minute.

However, the new service is still limited today to smaller gift amounts ($1, $5, $10 and $25), which can be a challenge for those attempting to raise funds for a larger present like an electronics purchase. Plus, being tied only to birthdays eliminates the big holiday, graduation or wedding presents users may want to go in on together. Often these larger presents are led by a close family member or friend who puts in a big chunk of change, to which others pile on. Not supporting these other types of gifting narrows the already potentially narrow market for digital, social gifting even further.

Amazon Birthday Gift is live now here for interested users.

Advertising giant WPP is taking another step into the world of startup investments, this time specifically in mobile and social media. WPP Ventures, a new investment arm of WPP Digital, today announced a stake in Muzy, a social media platform that presents its content arranged in a Pinterest-style grid layout. The site, in some regards, has flown under the radar, but it has some 20 million users and is adding 1 million each month. Terms of the investment were not disclosed but we are trying to find out. It is angel-backed by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and we’ve found out that the total size of this latest round is $4.4 million.

That growth, made so far without any marketing, promotion or distribution partners — and the facts that Muzy is social and mobile — are three possible reasons for why WPP took an interest in the site. Another is how WPP Ventures was first introduced to the company. “I met the Muzy founders through a friend at Andreessen Horowitz,” Tom Bedecarré of WPP Ventures told TechCrunch in an interview while he was in Cannes for WPP’s Stream event. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were early angel investors in Muzy.

Founded in 2011 and based in San Francisco, Muzy is led by co-founders Andrew Chen (CEO) and Matt Rubens (CTO). Chen had also held positions at Mohr Davidow Ventures and Revenue Science, while Rubens, an engineer, has worked at Amazon.com, among other places.

According to a release, the company will be using the funding to staff up — it currently employs less than 10 people — and “build out the suite of creative publishing tools for the Muzy platform.”

At the moment, when you go to the site, you can choose from some 50 widgets to publish content into your page, with a particularly strong emphasis on photos but also incorporating text, games and other content. It the app-within-app facility that sets Muzy apart from other platforms focused on content creation and self-expression, and could be one way for the company to differentiate longer term.

It could also be a way for WPP to look at ways of monetizing. You can imagine, for example, widgets or channels getting sponsored by brands, not to mention pages themselves. In an age where users are getting increasingly desensitized to display advertising online, you can see how new formats like these will continue to be tested out as ways of getting users to engage with marketing and as a way to create business models around sites like Muzy.

WPP has developed something of a track record in making strategic investments into digital, specifically mobile and other emerging areas, as a way of shoring up against larger trends in the industry away from more traditional forms of media like print.

Following where the consumer masses (and their eyeballs) are going, WPP has taken stakes in e-commerce sites like MySupermarket ($10 million in April 2012); and more straight media plays, such as yesterday’s news involving a stake in Fullscreen (undisclosed amount), stakes in Buddy Media (sold to Salesforce), Omniture (sold to Adobe) and more. One the biggest of the biggest investments made by WPP in digital was the company’s own acquisition of digital agency AKQA (June 2012, reportedly at a $550 million valuation).

It’s the AKQA deal that has provided the engine to today’s news around Muzy. The investment is being led by WPP Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based operation for WPP’s bigger investment efforts. Bedecarré, WPP Ventures’ president, is also chairman of AKQA (and, apparently, “Silicon Valley’s favorite ad man.” This is WPP Ventures’ first investment.

The timeline of when WPP may start to leverage Muzy is not laid out but it looks like it will be happening fast.

“WPP clients are looking for access to the next new social platform, the next big mobile app,” Bedecarré told TechCrunch. “I can’t wait to introduce Muzy to our clients and experiment with using their content publishing tools to create brand engagement. As an avid entrepreneur, I also want to help advise the Muzy founders on marketing and promoting their business, which has been operating in stealth mode to this date. I think we can significantly help them boost their growth and global distribution.”

WPP, one of the world’s very biggest ad agencies, says that in 2012 its digital revenues were over $5 billion, some 33% of its total revenues of $16.5 billion. It’s long been pursuing a target of getting 40% of its revenues coming from digital by 2018.

(Updated with comments from Tom Bedecarré.)

Popular exercise- and nutrition-tracking service MyFitnessPal is making its first significant effort to reach an international audience.

Co-founder Mike Lee said that MyFitnessPal now has “well north of” 40 million registered users. That already includes users in other countries: “In absolute numbers it’s large, but … it’s just a small percentage of our total userbase.” So Lee argued that there’s a big opportunity in creating localized versions of the service.

That’s what the company is announcing today. The smartphone app and website are now available in French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. They also support local units of measurement, so when users try to track how much they’ve been running or how much they’ve eaten, they can record it in kilometers and kilojoules. MyFitnessPal’s food database is adding around 600,000 international items (thanks to both the company’s efforts and its users). And it’s now offering localized message boards for customer support in South America and Europe.

As part of today’s update, MyFitnessPal is also releasing a redesigned Android app, with the aim of improving navigation and providing more consistent navigation. You can see a screenshot of the redesign to the right.

Next up are Nordic languages, Italian, and Russian, Lee said. The company also plans to do more to customize the service for different countries — after all, different regions may have slightly different cultures around health and fitness.

“Countries around the world are seeing the same negative health trends as in the U.S.,” he added. “There’s been a huge opportunity, and we now have the resources to do the work needed to create a great experience for international users.”

This global push will be backed up by the opening of international offices, but Lee said it’s too soon to announce anything specific. You can read more details in the company’s blog post.

Here’s a fun comparison from Optimal, a social advertising and analytics startup: If you look at big brands on social networks, their following seems to be growing more quickly on Twitter than on Facebook.

Optimal says it looked at the data from 4,330 brands, representing a total of 3.49 billion Facebook Likes and 595 million Twitter followers. Last week, those brands added 18.5 million new Likes and 4.5 million new followers — so on a percentage basis, their following grew 55 percent more quickly on Twitter than it did on Facebook.

Now, you might quibble about whether pitting Facebook Likes against Twitter followers is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison, but those are, ultimately, the main ways that businesses can count their following on each service. You could also point out the Twitter audience is still smaller than it is on Facebook — so even though Optimal said Twitter grew more quickly, the brands in question actually got more Facebook Likes than new Twitter followers.

There are cases, however, where brands have a larger following on Twitter, full stop. Facebook-owned Instagram, for example, added the most Twitter followers of all the brands tracked — 279,500 new followers compared to 214,300 Likes. It has 21.3 million followers total and 4.6 million Facebook Likes. (Facebook itself came in at No. 3 on Twitter growth, adding 167,400 new followers and 217,200 Likes.)

Not that Optimal CEO Rob Leathern is really trying to pitch this as Twitter overtaking Facebook.

“I think it does show that Twitter is growing and becoming more relevant for brands, too – in a sense ‘catching up’, but also it is different as well,” he told me via email. “A smaller but often more active audience.”

Optimal also broke down the data by industry. Department and general merchandise stores had the highest growth rate on Twitter (2.01 percent, versus 0.59 percent on Facebook), while books and magazines had the lowest (0.46 percent, compared to 0.61 percent on Facebook).

Leathern said this isn’t necessarily the first time Twitter has outpaced Facebook (in this very specific measurement) — it’s just “the first time we are looking at the data this way.”

The eyesore of a PowerPoint deck that contractor Edward Snowden had leaked had globally recognized names: Microsoft. Google. Yahoo. Facebook. Apple. AOL. Skype. YouTube. The NSA had allegedly collaborated with all of these Internet giants to request and access data on foreign users.

But then there was also PalTalk. WTF?

Even Stephen Colbert ribbed them last week. “You heard right. They’re monitoring PalTalk. Folks. You know what that means. We are that close to learning what PalTalk is….”

PalTalk, a profitable group video chat site that’s been around for more than a decade and has about 5.5 million monthly uniques, officially says it had no idea what PRISM was until the slidedeck was published — just like every other tech company. And then added — like every other tech company — that it doesn’t let any government agency have direct access to its servers, but that it legally complies with court orders.

“First of all, it was flattering to be included in that list of the top eight tech companies in the world,” said PalTalk president Wilson Kriegel, who recently came over from Zynga and OMGPOP. “But we weren’t aware of Prism. We’re not giving backdoor access to the NSA and we comply with the law as the law states we should.”

Unlike Apple and Facebook, which have recently shared more data about the volume of requests they receive from law enforcement agencies, Kriegel said PalTalk wasn’t disclosing the number of types of requests it had received. The company’s CEO Jason Katz is a lawyer by training, however, and PalTalk works with New York-based law firm Fross Zelnick to evaluate in-bound requests.

“Zuckerberg and Sergey [Brin] have to make public statements because they have at least a billion users. Trust is a component that can erode quickly. But for us, I’m not sure if there’s anything to gain at the end of the day from sharing data like that,” said Kriegel, who added that none of PalTalk’s metrics, engagement figures and daily actives have seen any major impact from the Prism news.

Kriegel said that he hadn’t been at the company long enough to know whether PalTalk had ever disputed a government request based on its constitutionality or whether it overreached. Other companies like Twitter have been more antagonistic with federal requests for user data.

But Kriegel did share some insights into how or why the company might have held such interest for federal law enforcement. PalTalk is a video chat community that offers free group video calls and chats, with more than 20 million streams viewed per day.

Their base is split with about one-third in the Middle East, one-third in Asia and one-third in the U.S. While the majority of the company’s revenues — which come in the form of subscriptions, advertising and virtual currency purchases — flow in from the U.S. and English-speaking countries, the Middle East delivers “significantly great revenues,” Kriegel said. Apparently, they have strong numbers of paying users from countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“The majority of our paying user base is in the U.S. and the Middle East,” he said. “If you think about these countries, not many countries in the region have wide access to credit, so we do well in very rich, oil-based economies like Saudi Arabia.”

A UN counter-terrorism report back from 2009 mentioned PalTalk as a place where Al-Qaeda-focused debate groups were held.

“The majority of all our interactions are about music, karaoke, languages, sports, politics, religion and dating,” Kriegel said. But he did say that video chat lets people get around restrictive social norms in other cultures. “If you want to interact with people in ways that aren’t always socially acceptable like with swearing, video chat might work for that.”

What better way for an anti-social app to get noticed than by insulting its target audience? London-based app design studio ustwo has just put up a pair of billboards in the hipster heartland of Shoreditch, East London, a stone’s throw from where its own studio is based, which brazenly proclaim: You have no friends and No one likes you.

The billboards, which will be teasing Shoreditch’s hipsters for two weeks, are an experimental ad campaign for one of ustwo’s recent apps: random photo-sharing app Rando, which launched back in March on iOS. Rando has now also been rolled out on to Android and Windows Phone. Last month ustwo said the app had racked up a full five million of its entirely social-less random photo shares after around two months in the wild.

So what’s with the anti-social insults? Rando’s schtick is that it eschews all the usual social paraphernalia developers typically embed in their apps. There’s no Facebook sign-in, zero social sharing options at all, no comments, no likes, no favourites, no followers/followees. There’s also no way to tell who gets the photos you share/receive, beyond a general location. It’s deliberately — liberatingly — stripped of context.

Turning to a fixed-location, paper-based advertising medium may seem pretty old school but Silicon Valley has long had a bit of a thing with billboards. ustwo’s Matt Miller tells TechCrunch that’s certainly one reason he was keen to experiment with papering giant fliers atop one of Shoreditch’s busier junctions. “I’ve always been interested in billboards since flying out to San Fran in 2012. I remember during a taxi journey over there, being really impressed with the billboards and thinking to myself how I’d love to see our work pushed that way back home,” he says.

The cost of the Rando billboard campaign is “around the same amount it would cost us to develop a small app”, according to Mills. But it’s the only paid marketing ustwo intends to do for Rando — relying instead on “the virality of the concept” to keep it travelling, which, ironically enough, has led to plenty of organic chatter on social sites like Twitter and Instagram.

As we continue to see more details brought to light in how the government requests and uses information about what we do on the web and on our mobile devices, an ex-Googler and a consumer rights attorney, who have dedicated themselves to helping users remain private, have raised some funding to do this better and in more places.

Disconnect – the startup behind the Disconnect.me extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers, which lets users of Facebook, Google and Twitter keep themselves from being tracked by third party sites, and the Disconnect 2 app that covers a wider range of sites — has raised a $3.5 million Series A round.

At the same time, as a measure of dedication to its principle of being positioned not for profit but for social good, Disconnect has been designated as a B Corporation, a semi-charitable certification. With the tax breaks and other help that this offers, it will let Disconnect dedicate time to raising awareness and campaigning as well as to creating for-profit products.

“As a B Corporation, we’re able to spend more time than a traditional company on activities such as consumer education, petition drives, and close collaboration with non-profits,” Gus Warren, a former Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital and part of Disconnect’s executive team, noted in a statement. “Disconnect is committed to benefiting not just shareholders but all stakeholders, including the public.” Warren will run the company’s New York office.

This most recent round of funding was led by FirstMark Capital, and comes on the back of a $600,000 seed round announced in March 2012. That round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Charles River Ventures, and angels including David Cancel, Mark Jacobstein, Ramesh Haridas, Vikas Taneja, Chris Hobbs, and Andy Toebben.

Founders Brian Kennish, formerly an engineer at Google who left to work on this full-time, and Casey Oppenheim, a consumer rights attorney, say the startup will be using the funding first of all to help with the launch of Disconnect 2 for Safari and Opera browsers.

Disconnect 2, launched in April 2013 as a Chrome and Firefox extension, blocks some 2,000 third-party websites that track you across the web. That vastly expands the power of the extension when it initially focused on a handful of portals. Disconnect.me first kicked off when Kennish was still at Google and created the Chrome extension for Facebook specifically, in October 2010.

Kennish notes that Disconnect 2 has gotten more than 250,000 new users since launching in April and that all the startup’s apps combined have more than 1,000,000 weekly active users. Within the current range of software, it is charged on a pay-what-you-want model. “Like Humble Bundle,” says Kennish, who adds, “Some of our upcoming releases will also include freemium features.”

In addition to helping block some 2,000 third-party sites that track users’ browsing histories, the Disconnect 2 extension also helps filter out malware and encrypts data that you share on sites “to prevent wireless eavesdropping.” The company also promises that by cutting down on a lot of the tracking noise, users are actually able to see faster-loading pages and use 17% less bandwidth on average.

“Increasingly, people want to know who’s tracking them online and want to have a say about what information is being collected about them,” Oppenheim noted in a statement. “Our software is designed to put users back in control so they can decide how their personal data is used,” adds Kennish.

Longer term, the company also hopes to focus more on protecting users around the various features of data mining.

“We’ve always thought one of the biggest threats to people’s online privacy is just how big data mining is getting,” Kennish told TechCrunch. “There’s so much personal data being collected about us in so many places now and all that data is susceptible to being used in ways we don’t want. So our goal is to help people minimize the unwanted collection and use of their data. We started by tackling third-party tracking because most people don’t know their browsing history is being tracked by thousands of invisible websites they’ve probably never even heard of.”

Kennish says company is also becoming increasingly focused on security services. “We think there are way too many holes in online consumer security, which recent events have made even more obvious, and we want to help plug some of those holes.”

We’ve been working on getting more details on a press event that Facebook is having this week. Earlier, we wrote it could launch a news-reading app, but we have since heard more details that point to something else entirely. On June 20, a source says Facebook will unveil that Instagram, its popular photo-sharing app, will begin to let people also take and share short videos. Call it the Vine effect.

We are still looking for more information because we understand that Facebook has not wanted the details of June 20 to leak out — so this could be an intentional blind alley. But if the Instagram video report is true, you could say the event invite itself — sent by snail mail, coffee cup stain charmingly in one corner — is a red herring of its own.

Earlier reports about Instagram getting video provide some indication, though, that this is not coming out of the blue. Most recently, about three weeks ago Matthew Keys broke a story noting that such a service was getting tested internally. At the time, there wasn’t any information on when it would be coming out, nor whether there would be filters, nor whether this would be in a separate app or part of an Instagram update. The videos would be between five and 10 seconds in length, he noted.

Getting video on Instagram is a move that would make sense. Specifically, it looks like a direct response to the rising popularity of video-sharing services, namely Twitter’s Vine. It, and others like Viddy, Cinemagram and Socialcam, sometimes get described as “Instragram for video” apps.

The Vine app — which lets users take six seconds of video footage on an iOS or Android handset and then share those clips to Vine’s own network, Twitter or Facebook — has shot up in popularity since going live in January. After Twitter debuted an Android version of Vine in the beginning of June, usage reached a tipping point: shares of Vines surpassed those of Instagram photos on Twitter — usage that has only diverged even more since then:

Of course, you could argue that part of the reason is because Twitter no longer shows inline views of Instagram photos — that may have affected how many Instagram photos have been shared to Twitter.

When those Instagram/Twitter cards disappeared, we noted that part of the reason for the move — taken by Facebook/Instagram, not Twitter — appeared to be to drive more direct traffic to Instagram itself, a popular social network in its own right, with over 100 million monthly active users, rising sharply since Facebook bought the company last year for $715 million.

Putting in a video service could serve to further that strategy even more, before new-but-already-popular services like Vine get more of a foothold. It will mean one less app and social network for users to build up, and, for those who like to take and share videos, another reason to visit Instagram. You can see how something like video could be a very sticky complement to its photo service.

There could be another reason for adding video to the service: it’s a very attractive medium for advertisers and marketers.

Of course, Instagram is not running any ads yet — in fact, Facebook and Instagram got a lot of heat over changes in their terms of service in December over how it could implement advertising services in the future — so much heat that they rolled back the ToS and apologized. And in Facebook’s last quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a point of noting that while big brands were interested in advertising on Instagram, for now there were no plans to implement this. (That’s not to say that Instagram is not already a substantial marketing platform for brands.)

And with 100 million+ users, you could argue that there may not be enough scale there yet to really monetize ads properly. Adding in video is laying the groundwork — and providing one more engine to grow that Instagrammer base.

Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Photo: ripleyb, Instagram

Additional reporting: Josh Constine

People assume the worst. So when it comes to counting government “requests” for private data, disclosing a number, even a high number, is far better than the fear of infinity. That’s why tech giants are fighting to show they aren’t open books surrendered to the NSA. They want to prove only the suspicious are being spied upon.

“Direct access” were the words that drummed up the fear. The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had attained direct access to the data of nine of the world’s largest tech companies. Many of those companies aggressively denied this, saying they only provide specifically requested data when legally obligated to. Unfortunately they were heavily muzzled regarding the specifics of what they could say. The vagueness combined with their initial inaccurate reports of direct access left the public shaken. Many innocent citizens got the sinking feeling they were being spied on.

Desperate To Disclose

Over the last week, the companies have been fighting for more freedom to disclose exactly how many government requests for data they’ve been receiving from the NSA. The hope was that that would quell the speculation.

Yesterday Facebook and Microsoft both cut deals to disclose numbers. Not hard numbers,  but at least a narrow range of numbers of requests they’ve recieved from the government for private user data on criminal as well as potential terrorist threats over the last six months. For Facebook, that range was nine to ten thousand requests on between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. For Microsoft, it was six to seven thousand requests affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 users.

Previously, all companies were completely gagged when it came to requests from the National Security Agency, legally required to keep the number of requests for data on potential terrorist threats a secret. The deals let them disclose numbers…but only in aggregate with local, state, and federal criminal data requests, and only in bands of one thousand to obscure the specifics.

Numbers, Even Obscured Numbers, Fight Fear

Why Facebook and Microsoft wanted this was that these numbers establish a worst case scenario. Rather than allow conspiracy theorists and panicked journalists (which I was guilty of being) to speculate that hundreds of thousands, millions, or everyone was under the watchful eye of the NSA big brother, it capped the number of people possibly monitored at 19,000 for Facebook and 32,000 for Microsoft. That is a lot more reassuring than people being scared the surveillance extended to all users.

Facebook needed a number to point to more than anyone. It’s business model lives and dies by private data. When users feel comfortable, they volunteer the fuel for Facebook’s content relevance and ad targeting engines. If they feel paranoid, they’re not going to deactivate their accounts, as Facebook has become too crucial a utility for most. But they will be subtly weary of sharing their more personal information and content. That hurts Facebook.

But Google and Twitter immediately criticized the social network. Why? Because they cut a bargain rather than hold out for exact numbers of NSA requests and the volume of people affected. Facebook settled for giving the public something rather than nothing, even if the data on the NSA is obscured by being combined with non-NSA requests for more traditional criminal cases. That could make it harder for other companies to get the NSA to loosen up even further.

Facebook didn’t want to keep the public in the pitch dark, and couldn’t risk not getting to disclose anything. If the government does what’s right, this disclosure will just be a stepping stone to the data Google and Twitter want to provide. True transparency. That’s what the public deserves. But regardless of the criticism, what Facebook and Microsoft won for the public yesterday will go a long way to reassuring us that these companies aren’t knowingly spilling the beans on everyone, and the government might not be as powerful as we suspected.

[Image Credit]

Ebay is generally credited with being the first company to bring auctions — a system that, for nearly 2,500 years, had exclusively taken place live in noisy, public (and offline) forums — into the Digital Era. But, today, in spite of the fact that eCommerce has become a thriving global industry, with online marketplaces collectively topping $1 trillion in sales last year, one market in particular has managed to resist the disruptive influence of technology and online commerce: The grand old world of fine art.

Not to be deterred, a handful of startups have emerged in recent years behind a shared goal of leveraging eBay’s online auction model to bring some automation and democratization to the staunchly brick-and-mortar industry. The efforts of three young companies in particular, the New York-based Paddle8, Berlin’s Auctionata and India’s Saffronart have begun to find some support, both from insiders and investors.

To wit: Last week, a number of well-known names in the fashion and art worlds put their through their support behind Paddle8, an online auction house founded in the summer of 2011 that aims to connect buyers and sellers of art through both monthly themed auctions and benefit auctions, which allow non-profits and foundations to hold events online.

Damien Hirst, the controversial, English pop artist, Alexander von Furstenberg, the son of prominent fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, along with members of the Mellon family were among those to contribute to the startup’s latest investment. The $6 million round follows on the heels of a $4 million Series A last year, both of which were led by Founder Collective and Mousse Partners.

Part of the interest in Paddle8 is its mission to become the online destination for beginners and wily veterans alike. It wants to walk the line between stuffy and accessible, allowing the public to access and buy legit, curated works and find insider opinions from the influential figures who participate as guest curators for its auctions.

There’s also the fact that, as Semil Shah wrote when he interviewed co-founder Aditya Julka earlier this year, it’s not easy to build a viable online marketplace in a complex and opaque industry like the one that has grown up around fine art over the decades. Artists, gallery owners and collectors are very particular about the process by which pieces of art move between each party involved in the transaction (understandably, given the amount of money that may be exchanging hands) and what kind of re-sale options are involved.

As Semil points out, a virtual auction house, if done right, can solve problems which have traditionally deterred some art holders from working with offline auction houses. For example, if an owner ends up selling art back to the gallery after buying it at an auction, they’re likely going to take a significant hit in doing so. Not to mention the fact that many auction houses (online and off) typically price out a big chunk of the market, limiting auctions to items over $100K.

Paddle8 aims to deal with these industry-specific issues by catering to the “lower, higher end” of the market, offering auctions on items up to $100K and setting durations at a fairly lengthy two weeks. In saying “lower, higher end,” we mean that it’s not quite the affordable, accessible-to-everyone end of the market startups like Zazzle and Art.com cater to; however, it still opens it up to a larger audience than those upstream, while maintaining an air of “legitimacy” for serious buyers and sellers.

For galleries and gallery owners, the startup offers a set of services which allow them to run their back-ends via its platform, including a dashboard for inventory and transactional management and the ability to ship, install and insure artworks without placing limits on time and geography, as we wrote last year.

The key to building a successful marketplace and business in a niche industry like this (and really any other, for that matter) is that you have to know, and respect, your audience. Even if they’re a little bit eccentric — or snobby. Paddle8 also gives galleries, art fairs and museums a POS transaction platform and, going forward, it wants to offer them private, virtual rooms to display artworks to potential buyers — rather than having to attach a .JPEG to an email, which is the way things usually work — along with the ability to auction works outside of their exhibition. The company also attempts to appeal to art sellers by taking a 6 percent commission from sellers, while charging buyers 12 percent.

The startup also keeps all records and prices involved in auctions private, meaning that it doesn’t disclose details of whether or not a piece of art sold, didn’t sell, or sold for less than the asking price. For artists or owners, this can be a fairly attractive policy in an industry that’s all about your reputation and show — taking a hit or failing to sell might have insiders turning up their nose at you the next time around.

Of course, Paddle8 isn’t the only one that sees opportunity in a digital marketplace for fine art. Founded last year, Auctionata shares a somewhat similar vision in that it wants to peel back some of the frumpy layers of the art world by making the international art market more accessible to the general public. In a slightly different approach than Paddle8, however, the Berlin-based startup is going directly after the big names in the old world of auctions, like Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

It’s doing this by attempting to re-define the familiar, live format by hosting auctions every Friday from its own TV studio. Basically, it’s going for the 100-percent-online, streaming media version of Sotheby’s. Auctionata also offers evaluation, appraisal, authentication and marketing services — along with some of the logistical tools in Paddle8′s arsenal. However, unlike Paddle8, where the average artwork sells for about $10K, Auctionata is going after the high-end. In April, it auctioned off a painting that a had a starting price of $1.5 million, for example.

Having grown to 110 employees over the last 12 months and looking to expand further to go full bore after this market, Auctionata recently raised some of its own outside capital. In April, the startup landed $20 million from Earlybird Venture Capital, Bright Capital and Kite Ventures, among others, bringing its total investment to $23 million.

With its new capital, Auctionata wants to continue hiring and build a bigger, 5,000-foot studio in New York, and expects to hit $20 million in revenue this year, according to Crain’s.

Meanwhile, with Paddle8 busy attacking the fine art market in the U.S. and Auctionata moving across Europe, a company called Saffronart has been busy applying the eBay-for-fine-art model to its home market in India. In fact, the company, which has been around in various incarnations for over a decade and has raised over $12 million from Sequoia and others, now claims to be the “largest fine-art auction house in India, online or otherwise, and one of the largest online fine art auction platforms in the world.”

For most of that time, Saffronart was almost exclusively focused on the Indian market (and Indian art) and while it’s sticking with what’s working, it, too, has been looking to expand its scope and started selling Western art for the first time last year.

Whether or not this world seems too niche to get overly excited about, these startups are finding an eager audience, especially toward the lower-end of the market. The musty air of the fine art market is in sore need of some fresh tools that can make its goods and services more accessible, and whether or not we find it all a little high-falutin’, for these three companies (among others), the approach seems to be (quietly) paying off.

The upcoming death of Google Reader, the addition of hashtags, and other signs signal that Facebook may launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. It could be a sort of “trending articles on Facebook” feature, or a more full-blown RSS reader-style product.

Either could take advantage of Facebook’s massive treasure trove of aggregate data on what people share to surface popular and personally recommended news articles.

[Update 6/17, 5:30am PST: But maybe not. Despite the signs and what I'd heard, my fellow writer Ingrid Lunden writes that a source tells TechCrunch that the June 20th press event will see the launch of a new video sharing experience, either within Instagram, Facebook's apps, or a new standalone app.]

This article, originally titled “Facebook Will Launch A News Reader At June 20th Press Event” has had its headline and article has been updated to reflect the information that conflicts with my original assertion. I still think a news product is a possibility, if not for this event, then in the future. If Facebook doesn’t launch a news product on Thursday, I’ll apologize for my error but for now we’ll have to wait and see.]

The upcoming death of Google Reader, the addition of hashtags, and other signs say Facebook may launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. [Update: However, a TechCrunch source says Facebook may launch a new way to share videos, either within Instagram, Facebook's apps, or in a new standalone app. More update details within.]

The event invite, first spotted by Joanna Stern of ABC News, says “A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.” The conspicuously analog invite was sent out via paper snail mail instead of by email like Facebook usually does. There’s also a coffee stain on the invite. You know where else you find coffee stains? On the newspaper, while you’re reading it, over coffee.

Nobody knows what Facebook knows. Since most users share semi-privately, it can’t be scraped for trending topics. But Facebook’s algorithms see all. Similar to how it offers ad targeting data in anonymous aggregate, Facebook could surface what articles are being shared most frequently across its user base without violating privacy.

The product could potentially let people follow outside sources of news through a format like RSS, but we can’t confirm that. The product would likely take advantage of hashtags that Facebook users can now add to posts to help its algorithms understand what topics different news articles are about.

When I asked Facebook about what more it could do with its data on what people share, it initially offered to put me on the phone with someone, but ended up just referring me to the hashtag announcement from earlier this week. That blog post notes “Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months.”

A better way to surface news could be that next step, though I couldn’t get anyone at Facebook to confirm on the record.

Whether the new product includes formal RSS reading capabilities that take advantage of the long-running content syndication standard remains to be seen. Asking users to choose different sources and subscribe to feeds of them could be a lot of work and seem somewhat redundant for the average Facebook user. Still, that kind of functionality could find an audience amongst hardcore Internet users.

As our Ingrid Lunden wrote yesterday, “Lines of code referring to “rssfeeds” have recently started to appear in Facebook’s Graph API code (as spotted by developer and Facebook sleuth Tom Waddington). Linking the RSS feed to a user’s Facebook ID, the code schema also covers such aspects as title, URL and update time. Each RSS feed subsequently has entries and subscribers.” This code could be part of the new product, but it also may be unrelated, having to do with a user’s own posts being an RSS feed, rather than a user reading feeds produced by others.

A Facebook news reader with RSS would come at a perfect time, just two weeks before Google shuts down Google Reader for good. The June 20th launch date might give Facebook just enough time to help people migrate onto its version.

Alternatively, Facebook’s new product could more closely resemble Reddit or a list of trending articles based on what’s being shared the most on the social network. That would make it instantly and easily valuable to people.

Whatever it’s exact design, I hope it won’t just be a clone, but something that combines the unique social signals Facebook has access to with tried-and-true news consumption mediums.

A reader of any form would certainly qualify as a “big idea”, as Facebook is all about connecting you to people, things, and information you care about, and news is by definition what people care about. A successful launch could drastically increase time spent on Facebook, fill it with useful data about what topics people are interested in, offer new advertising opportunities around current events, and most importantly, make us all better informed citizens of Earth.

Back in March, I wrote about how Heyzap was introducing advertising to its mobile gaming platform. Now co-founder Jude Gomila says the company has become a significant player in mobile advertising.

Specifically, Gomila sent along the chart showing the growth in publishers running Heyzap ads and the corresponding growth in ad impressions over the past six months. You can’t tell exactly where things stand now, because there’s no Y-axis to the chart. However, Gomila did note that Heyzap ads are now running in 800 games (it was 350 in March), and that number is also growing quickly. He also said that the publishers advertising with Heyzap include big names like Zynga and DeNA.

In the six months since the program launched, ad revenue has grown to the point that it already makes up the majority of its revenue. As a result, Heyzap is looking to expand its team beyond the current 25-person workforce.

“This does change our priorities,” Gomila said. “We want to offer full monetization tools for game developers. There’s also opportunity for a lot more automation.”

Gomila refers to Heyzap’s ad program as its “game discovery network” — basically, when publishers pay to promote their games, Heyzap will start recommending that game through interstitial units that pop up in the games. Those recommendations are also based on the gaming data that users share on Heyzap’s social platform, so Gomila said the discovery network and the social tools “go hand-in-hand.”

He argued that this is a much better approach for the mobile gaming ecosystem, because Heyzap can recommend games that users are actually likely to enjoy.

“We think most mobile ads suck,” he said.

As photo-sharing truly hits its stride, an entire ecosystem is born around it. But what is creation without consumption? That’s what Divvy is all about.

We met the folks behind Divvy at the TC Meetup + Pitch-Off. At its core, the app aggregates all your photos from Facebook and Instagram (Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox all coming soon) into one filter-capable stream. You can also save photos from Instagram, zoom in on photos, and share with groups or individuals.

The Divvy team drove cross-country to get the Divvy word out before hitting up the Austin Pitch-Off. But does standalone consumption have a place in the already-crowded photo space?

While the idea of a centralized location for photo viewing and engagement (rather than multiple social networks to check) makes us pink* with barely controlled glee, we also maintain that a photo creation experience is integral to making any app of this kind a true “one-stop shop” experience.

But that’s not to say that the team isn’t already working on that.

I give Divvy a hesitant fly — I’m on board with idea and trajectory (assuming they add photo creation soon) but also don’t feel addicted to using the app. John also gives Divvy a fly, as well as his blessing.

*We got the memo.

Songbird, an early digital music service that aimed to compete against the iTunes, Pandoras and Spotifies of this world with an open source platform, is shutting down on June 28, after running out of money and failing to find a buyer. The startup, backed by Sequoia, Atlas Venture and Phillips, had raised at least $11 million and is planning to formally announce the news on its own site later today.

“Unfortunately, the company has found ourselves unable to fund further business operations and as of June 28, 2013 all of Songbird’s operations and associated services will be discontinued,” CEO Eric Wittman wrote in an email to TechCrunch. A post in Digital Trends on the closure notes that a sale of the company had fallen through at the last minute.

Songbird is the flagship product launched back in 2007 by Pioneers of the Inevitable, first as a desktop open source alternative to iTunes, and more recently as an online, Android and iPhone app that also offers ways to stream music, incorporating different audio formats and making an especially strong emphasis on higher-quality audio FLAC files, and offering YouTube-powered access to playlists. The online social music service, songbird.me, was attracting over one million users each month, Wittman says.

The open-source code behind Songbird was used as the basis for other services that could then customize the look and features (and subsequent monetization) around it. That code is still available to download, but it’s not sure for how long, and it’s also the basis of a service, Nightingale, that Wittman and Songbird are now recommending as an alternative to Songbird’s users.

It looks like POTI will close along with the demise of Songbird. It is unclear how many employees will be affected. We have reached out to the company, as well as its investors, and will update this post as we learn more.

You can see how it may have been hard for a company like Songbird, which lost its founder Rob Lord back in 2009 amid a bid to improve its monetization, to compete and get enough scale in the margin-squeezed world of digital music.

On the download side, companies like Apple’s iTunes and Amazon are oversized players. Meanwhile, mindshare (and marketshare) in streaming music services go to Spotify, Pandora and to a lesser extent companies like Rdio and Deezer; and there are yet more, well-backed names wading into the game every day, including Apple’s iTunes Radio and Twitter Music.

Update: that announcement is now live, and Wittman has also answered some of our questions. He says that plans for Songbird now are to work on placing the team members to “do our best to transition customers and to find a buyer for the assets. We’ll be working hard to do all of this over the next few weeks.”

He notes that the company, after a restructure in 2012, had 11 employees. “These folks were rock stars in their respective areas and loved working together as a team and did so very well.” It was during the restructure in 2012 that Wittman, who had been SVP of product, became CEO. He’s been with the company since June 2011.

“We currently have enough [cash] to sustain minimal operations through end of the month,” he adds. The company had been in the middle of pivoting the business from being one primarily focused on licensing our Desktop product to 3rd parties to one focused on offering premium features such as remote music collection access; music in HD formats like FLAC; and advertising. “Sadly we were unable to make this transition in time before cash ran out.”

And we have also heard back from Sequoia, which noted that it had actually sold its stake in the company after the partner who led the investment left the firm. A spokesperson wouldn’t provide more details.

Last week, Facebook announced that it will be streamlining the ad-buying process by eliminating more than half of its 27 ad units. Today it’s taking one step towards that goal by announcing that it will be eliminating the Sponsored Results unit starting in July.

The unit officially launched in August 2012, allowing businesses to run ads in the “typeahead” results that show up when users enter a search query. The early Sponsored Results campaigns seemed to get a positive response, but the company says it noticed that most advertisers were buying those units to promote their apps and games — and its mobile app install ads and Page post link ads can achieve the same goals more effectively.

Here’s the statement from Facebook:

In keeping with the goal of streamlining our ad products, starting in July advertisers will no longer be able to buy sponsored results. We’ve seen that most marketers were buying sponsored results to advertise their apps and games, and we already offer mobile app install ads and Page post link ads on desktop to achieve these same goals.

That doesn’t mean you won’t see any ads in Facebook Graph Search — it’s just the specific Sponsored Results unit that’s being cut for now. Unlike Sponsored Results, Facebook says its other search ad units are targeted based on the user, rather than the search or the typeahead results.

Facebook previously said that its goal in eliminating ad units is to make its entire ad program more cohesive and to eliminate the “guesswork” for advertisers.

Move over Reeder, Feedly, Digg, NewsBlur, Feedbin and the rest of the RSS players who hope to pick up some new users with the impending demise of Google Reader. Facebook may also be looking to wade into the game.

Asked whether Facebook is planning to launch an RSS product, a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch, “We’re not commenting.” But there are some hints in Facebook’s Graph API code that could indicate otherwise.

Lines of code referring to “rssfeeds” have recently started to appear in Facebook’s Graph API code. Linking the RSS feed to a user’s Facebook ID, the code schema also covers such aspects as title, URL and update time. Each RSS feed subsequently has entries and subscribers.

Sleuthing developer Tom Waddington, who brought the new RSS code to our attention, notes that when he tried to run this new code through Facebook’s Graph API Explorer, the results come up as restricted only to whitelisted addresses.

While Google has decided to shut down its Reader product because “usage has declined,” it pointed out at the time that “the product has a loyal following.” Facebook, always on the search for users to spend more time on its site, could use an RSS service as one route to achieving that, while at the same time getting its chance to play the hero out of one of Google’s many bouts of spring cleaning.

It also makes sense that Facebook would want to offer users an alternative way to consume content on its platform. It’s already become a go-to homepage of sorts for users aggregating news, information, social updates and entertainment feeds into one stream; this could be used as another.

It could also be connected with a rumored update to Notes to better compete with Tumblr. This too could use an RSS feed to bring in content.

Indeed, what the code doesn’t seem to make clear is whether the feeds would be of Facebook content or content from the broader web. Nor is it clear that whatever RSS feeds end up powering, it would ever be positioned as a straight Google Reader replacement, since, as my colleague Sarah points out, RSS never went mainstream so most users would not know what this means. 

Creating a feature that could aggregate content from the wider web would make sense: if Graph Search already lets you look in the wider web for content, why not an RSS feed to help aggregate that better?

Facebook has dabbled in RSS before. In 2011, it added a “Subscribe via RSS” option to Pages, along with “Subscribe via SMS.” This is how that option looked:

In December 2012, Facebook dropped Subscribe in favor of a new “Follow” feature. At some point around that and the Timeline update, it appears to have quietly dropped the “Subscribe via RSS” feature.

You can still apparently subscribe to a Page in RSS, but it’s not exactly one step. (Here’s an example of a slightly laborious how-to.). Facebook also lets users create RSS feeds for their own Notifications, but again it’s not something you can do with one click of your mouse. In both cases, there are separate windows and manual copying of code involved — easy and nothing for some geeks; but not a mass-market opportunity.

Still, I wondered if the code that Waddington found in the Graph API might be somehow related to that Notification feature. “The simplest way to know it’s unrelated to those Notification RSS points is that it’s also in the API,” he tells me. You can add, remove and edit multiple RSS feeds per user in the newer code. “Spitting out the data Facebook already has wouldn’t involve the API like that.”

The new code that’s appeared describes connections from a user to RSS feeds, an RSS feed having multiple entries, and each RSS feed being subscribed to by multiple users. “It’s *exactly* what you’d code to start up a Google Reader clone,” he says.

Foursquare this morning has launched a pretty new visualization feature called Foursquare Time Machine, which offers a new way to view a history of your check-ins on an interactive map. And oh, it’s also an advertisement for Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone. Hey, look, Foursquare is trying to make some money by using your data! How clever!

The company has long since allowed users to delve into their check-in history through a searchable timeline it offers on the Foursquare.com website. And while the new Time Machine offers a briefly fun diversion for bored office workers looking for a little escapism, there’s not much value to it as a real product feature that you would return to again and again, following your first, more curious exploration.

As the Foursquare blog post explains, Time Machine lets users view their history and “zoom through time and space” to visualize your check-ins and “discover all the places you should head to next.” On that latter point, it appears to be referring to the images at the bottom of the Time Machine page which suggest other venues near your top check-in spots, which you can click on and save for later if you choose.

Users can also compile and then share their stats as a custom infographic to networks like Facebook and Twitter, which it seems many are excited to do.

But all this is really just a front to allow Foursquare to show you (and generate some revenue from) a large Samsung Galaxy S4 ad. The site is branded on the left side and on the top right (upon first launch), and, after clicking “fetch my history,” the middle of the Time Machine’s top navigation teases “The Next Big Thing.” As that experience loads, Samsung Galaxy S4′s branding shows yet again. There is literally nowhere on this micro-site where you can’t see the word “Samsung.” To be clear, this is not a Foursquare product or feature, this is only an ad.

The company has been busy in recent weeks beefing up its online experience at Foursquare.com in an effort to get more users to consider visiting its site on the web where it could monetize better through ads. This is tough, since Foursquare is still generally known as a mobile check-in app, and not the Yelp alternative it now wants to become. In addition, Foursquare has been opening up its platform to more businesses and advertisers, striking deals with the major credit card companies for member discounts, bumping up its sales force, and more, all in an effort to finally make some money. And it has bought itself a little more time to figure things out, too, thanks to its recent $41 million round, closed this spring.

It’s a timely move for Samsung as well, as the branded Time Machine experience comes on the heels of a recent Reuters report stating that Galaxy S4 sales were going to disappoint. Brokerages downgraded Samsung, citing weakening profit growth for the company. Though the S4 became the fastest-selling smartphone since its launch in late April, that momentum has now slowed, leading Samsung to a need for bigger and more creative ads.

You know, just like this.

Twitter now provides you with pretty extensive metrics and analytics for the performance of your tweets via its Ads dashboard (via TNW), in a move that looks designed to get more people (including individuals) aware of and using the Twitter Ads platform. The new free analytics dashboard access allows anyone to see the performance of their tweets, including how many Faves, Retweets and Replies each has received, as well as letting them sort by “Best, Good or All” for at-a-glance ranking of tweet performance.

Besides letting me know that I’m pretty terrible at Twitter, it’s a great tool for anyone who might want to check their actual reach and engagement without signing up for a third-party product or using a Twitter client from an outside developer, some of which have these kinds of tools built in. It reveals things you might now have known about Twitter, like the fact that posts which do well in terms of Faves and Replies don’t seem to do very well at all in terms of Retweets, and vice versa.

You can also download all the information as a CSV for later use, and see how many people are clicking on the links you tweet, which is pretty useful for anyone who wants to track exactly how much Twitter is helping them in terms of drumming up engagement. All of which is to say, this could become a treasure trove of data for marketers, although it does seem to lack some data in terms of actually populating these fields for me in my own personal dashboard.

This has previously all been content given over to Twitter’s business customers looking to build an ad following, but so long as Twitter has the resources in its ad department to support it, making the tools more accessible to all is a good way to adds more input channels to its overall revenue picture. Even if individual bloggers and “social media experts” aren’t huge catches in terms of constant revenue, they each add to the sum total, driving Twitter’s potential profits up.

To gain access, just navigate to ads.twitter.com, sign in with your Twitter credentials and click the “Analytics” link at the top of the page (you don’t actually need to bother with the Twitter Advertising sign-up process).

Even though it might seem intuitive that one messaging app will rule them all, WeChat, Line, WhatsApp and others are proving that messaging remains a stubbornly fragmented category with many geographic regions of the world seeing different leaders. KakaoTalk rules in South Korea, while WeChat dominates in China, while Line rules in Japan and the U.S. has no overwhelming leader.

One thing that’s interesting to note is how these apps are growing outside of their home markets. They are, in fact, spreading through immigrants, according to app tracking company Onavo.

So immigrants aren’t just bringing their languages and cultures to new countries; they’re bringing apps too.

The company is basing its thesis on correlations between usage of different apps in the U.S. market. Onavo has a couple data compression and management apps that several million people use to manage their data. Because they track data flowing in and out of every app, they have a gauge on which apps are actively being used at any time on an anonymous, aggregated basis.

They, for example, found that U.S.-based users of foreign messaging apps were several times more likely to use international dialing apps and dictionary or translation apps related to the home country of their messaging apps. That hints that they might be first-generation or recent immigrants.

KakaoTalk users are much more likely to also use other Korean apps, like Viki, which lets people watch Korean TV dramas. WeChat users in the U.S. were 61 times more likely to also use Chinese social network RenRen, 56 times more likely to use a Chinese-English Dictionary and 52 times more like to use QQ.

Line, which dominates Japan with 69 percent of iOS users in that country using the app on a monthly basis, has much smaller reach in the U.S. market. But U.S. users of line are 11 times more likely to use WeChat and eight times more likely to use KakaoTalk.

WhatsApp, the Silicon Valley-based messaging company which has found 78 percent market share in India, reached new records this month with more than 10 inbound billion messages sent per day.

Its U.S. users are seven times more likely to use an Indian TV app called NDTV, seven times more likely to use Bollywood Music Radio and six times more likely to use Bollywood music app Saavn.

Viber, another app that’s found reach in India, has U.S. users who are nine times more likely to use an Islamic prayer tracking app Athan, eight times more likely to use Hindi radio app Raaga and seven times more likely to use Bollywood Music Radio.

If immigrants are helping to spread these apps beyond their home markets, it bodes well for countries that have large and very spread out diasporas like China.