Dads will be more likely to purchase back-to-school supplies on their mobile devices, according to Rubicon Project's second Back-To-School Consumer Pulse Survey.

From Tweetdeck to Hootsuite, small businesses have plenty of ways to track their Twitter activity and audience behavior. But that isn't stopping Twitter from getting in on the act with a new Dashboard app for businesses.

It's good to be Facebook. Despite its unsettling size and vast wealth, the social giant still elicits more "love" from consumers than any other brand in the world. That's according to the latest "Brand Passion" report from social quantifier NetBase, for which it extracted consumer sentiment from around 265 million social posts.

To its credit, Twitter has recently been on a product-improvement tear. Just last week, the network increased its allotted video upload length from 30 seconds to 140 seconds; launched Engage, a new app for video creators to more easily manage their fan bases; and laid the groundwork for a "Watch Mode," which will soon let users sit back and stream one video after another. Now, as part of a broader effort to engage more users, Twitter is adding a virtual #Stickers feature.

Whatever your position on gun control, there's no question that this week's sit-in on the House floor was a win for Facebook Live. Along with Twitter's Periscope, Facebook's live video-streaming feature made it possible for people to follow the political drama, because Republican leaders had ordered the House to shut down its official camera feed. As of yesterday morning, the Live feeds of some 19 members of Congress had been watched more than 3 million times, according to Facebook.

In a recent conversation I had with a data scientist, he said, "When it comes to data collection, I have no morals." Though he quickly mitigated that statement, saying, "The data I care about is actionable data, and I would never use personally identifiable information in a public setting." But he said he has no qualms about collecting and testing any data to see if it was valuable to his business' KPIs.

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of hosting my wife's three young nieces. Along with an at-home "facial" and too many pop-culture references to count, they gave me a front-row seat to the social proclivities of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds. In their behavior, of course, lay the fortunes of tech giants. By my reckoning, their time and interest was evenly split between Snapchat and Instagram. Honestly, I don't think they made a single mention of Facebook or Twitter -- except for 12-year-old Kate saying how she didn't "get" the latter.

That's clearly what the social giant is thinking. To that end, the network is increasing its allotted video upload length from 30 seconds to -- what else? -- 140 seconds.

Mobile is beyond hot right now. Illustrating this point, Zenith now expects the ad medium to overtake desktop by 2017 -- a full year ahead of the Publicis unit's previous forecast.

What ad would you serve someone tweeting smiling poop emojis? Silly as it sounds, this is a serious question for brands and their tech partners to consider now that Twitter is inviting them to target users based on their preferred emojis.