To Apple’s chagrin, Google Maps returning to the iPhone this week is getting more good press than a chimp in space. “Hallelujah!” The Atlantic exclaims.   “Call it an early Christmas gift from Google,” ABC News gushes. Fortune, meanwhile, can’t wait to tell readers about “10 cool things about Google’s new Maps app for iPhone.” Yet all the excitement only magnifies Apple’s failure to launch a successful mapping app of its own -- proving to some that, for all its successes, the company has serious Web service shortcomings. Indeed, Apple dropping its Maps contract with Google was …

Instagram -- the Facebook-owned photo filtering and sharing service -- officially disabled photo integration with Twitter, this weekend. “While users can still post links to their Instagram photos on Twitter, they’ll no longer be able to view Instagram photos from within the Twitter stream across both the Twitter Web site and mobile apps,” AllThingsD reports. “Now when [users] share an Instagram photo on Twitter, only a link to the photo on Instagram’s site will appear on your timeline,” VentureBeat writes. “Sound the social alarm!” PCMag half-jokes. “In an appearance last week, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said he …

Promising to reshape online advertising as we know it, Facebook is reportedly in talks to buy Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions ad-serving product. “[Facebook] has been conducting due diligence on the media measurement platform, part of its efforts to create its own advertising network for third-party Web sites to compete with Google’s DoubleClick,” AllThingsD reports, citing sources. “If completed, [the deal] would put Facebook one huge step closer to launching an ad network that could rival Google's in size and change the way advertising is done online forever,” writes Business Insider. “Facebook currently generates 86% of its revenue, which totaled …

Increasing tensions between Twitter and Instagram, Facebook’s photo sharing service has disabled the ability for Twitter users to properly display Instagram photos. “Welcome to the Photo Wars,” The New York Times’ Bits blog writes on the news. Addressing the move at a conference this week, Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s founder and CEO, said Instagram wants to take control of its content, TechCrunch reports. “Instagram's CEO wants people to use the new Web client on Instagram.com because he thinks it is a better user experience,” writes The Verge. “Over time, Instagram images will no longer display inline on Twitter.com …

Perhaps ahead of its time, The Daily is calling it quits after less than two years of operation. Where did News Corp.’s iPad-based newspaper go wrong? “Our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term,” News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch explained in a press release. “The app was initially hampered by technical problems, but the Daily’s key issue was a conceptual one,” according to AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka. “Given the amount of free news available online, persuading people to subscribe to an iPad-only …