In addition to providing insight into consumer attitudes and preferences, social media data can help businesses adjust their pricing to better reflect their value, as determined by their online reputations. That's the idea behind a new product for the hospitality industry from IDeaS Revenue Solutions, which has partnered with Revinate, a company that tracks hotel reputations, to incorporate social media data into their pricing recommendations for hotels.

If watching videos from thousands of beautiful women sounds like a dream job, you might want to look into a job with IT Cosmetics. The beauty brand is turning to the world of video bloggers to find three new spokes-models, the "IT Girls" (and no, that doesn't stand for "Information Technology Girls," as I thought at first glance).

Social media has been linked to binge drinking, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia, published in the Drug and Alcohol Review. Just as people can get unrealistic ideas about other people's fabulous lives from holiday pictures posted online, the posting of photos depicting drunken revelry on social media can lead people who see them to overestimate what constitutes a normal amount of alcohol consumption -- a phenomenon I am going to call "intoxication inflation."

Twitter is rumored to be in talks to acquire digital publishing platform Flipboard according to Re/code, which first reported the news, citing a number of unnamed sources familiar with the situation. These sources tell Re/code the deal would be a purely stock transaction valuing Flipboard at over $1 billion -- but add that the negotiations appear to have reached an impasse for some reason (my guess: it has something to do with money).

There's nothing quite so awkward as meeting someone you're supposed to remember face-to-face, when you actually have no idea at all who they are -- but getting a message from a forgotten acquaintance is a close second, requiring the same kind of fast, delicate detective work or alternatively, weird avoidance of any specific details about any subject. In the worst-case scenario it starts to look like dialogue from a play by Harold Pinter:

This week Facebook took another step in its plan to do, well, everything with its acquisition of Tugboat Yards, a startup that enabled small and medium-sized publishers to generate revenue from subscriptions, tips, and other forms of payment from their small but devoted followings. Facebook is shutting down the previous Tugboat Yards service as of June 30, but will resurrect its technology as part of the main Facebook platform.

Twitter has unveiled a partnership with Google, allowing U.S. users to see relevant tweets in Google search results within the Google app and on the mobile Web. A similar integration for desktop search results is coming soon, along with an international version.

The new apps for Facebook's Messenger platform have, so far at least, failed to set the world on fire, with relatively low levels of adoption. To help prime the pump and draw people on to the platform, Facebook is looking into bringing games to Messenger, including strategic discussions with several big game developers, according to The Information, which first reported the news.

The Chief Marketing Officer Council is expanding its partnership with UNICEF's Global Innovation Center with the launch of a new global online community, CauseTech.net, where members can crowdsource and share ideas, inventions, products, and technologies to help the UNICEF GIC in its mission of spreading ideas that can advance the cause of children in the developing world.

Major League Baseball content is coming to Snapchat, at least in abbreviated form, courtesy of a new partnership between the messaging platform and Major League Baseball Advanced Media, a consortium formed by MLB club owners. The partners will bring official MLB video, as well as user-generated baseball content, to Snapchat's "Our Stories" feature, with a series of weekly stories called "MLB Wednesdays."