From an outsider's perspective, the care, effort and data science that can go into making a seemingly minor change in the user experience can look like madness. Who cares enough to change a star to a heart or swap out one shade of blue for another?

What took you so long, Tumblr?! Following the lead of Facebook and other social platforms, Tumblr is finally joining the mobile messaging party. Yep, users can now engage in real threaded, instant messaging on the Web and Tumblr's mobile app.

The future is clearly a mobile one. If you haven't figured that out by now, then best of luck to you. Still, over the next year, the degree to which mobile will transform customer engagement and envelop other channels is going to take many businesses off-guard. That's according to a new forecast from Forrester, which put mobile's ascension in stark terms.

Snapchat is killing it. The app is currently enjoying 6 billion video views a day, sources tell the Financial Times. If accurate, that's up by about 300% since May. What's more, those numbers aren't far off from the 8 billion daily video views that Facebook presently sees across mobile and desktop.

Threatening to bust the mobile boom, app makers are playing a dangerous game with people's personal information. That's according to new and highly credible research, which tested 110 of the most popular Android and iOS apps on the market to see which ones shared personal, behavioral, and location data with third parties.

Facebook has acquired more than 50 companies since its founding, about a fifth of which are directly related to mobile devices and technology. The newest Q3 earnings report from Facebook shows that all those acquisitions are paying for themselves. Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 78% of all ad revenue for the third quarter of 2015, up from 66% in the third quarter of 2014.

Facebook appears to have a posting problem. Over the past year, the share of users updating their status is down from 50% to 34% -- while the share of those posting pictures is off from 59% to 37% -- according to new data from market research firm GlobalWebIndex.

Bubble! Like the jerk of a knee, that's how plenty of people are responding to word that Activision Blizzard is dropping $5.9 billion on King Digital -- the maker of mobile gaming sensation Candy Crush Saga. "This is just one of a number of valuations that are increasingly unrealistically high," according to Mike Wade, professor at the IMD Business School in Switzerland.

Apple watchers are pretty excited about what looks to be a dedicated indoor positioning app. First noticed on the App Store by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, this weekend, the Indoor Survey App should help businesses map out their physical footprints. From there, they can show shoppers around, direct them to particular products, and encourage them to stick around for a bit longer.