Twitter just officially launched its “retweet with comment” feature. Original tests began last year. “Retweet with comment” lets usersembed a tweet in their own tweets, which lets them get around Twitter’s 140-character limit. The feature is now available on Twitter’s site and iPhone app and will be available on its Android app soon.

Changing course, The New York Times is reportedly ready to offer free access to its NYC Now mobile app. “The Times is revving up its efforts to develop mobile readership and rethinking its second-generation paid-products after last year's initial push,” Capital New York writes. The NYC Now app currently costs subscribers $8 a month. 

Snapchat has faced criticism for failing to prevent third-party apps from helping users to save snaps, even though senders count on them to disappear. Now, however, the social network is promising a “complete shutdown of third-party apps,” Backchannel reports. “For months, Snapchat has been making it harder for outsiders to write such apps; now it has introduced new techniques that it hopes will shut the door decisively.” 

Determined to lead the ongoing mobile revolution, Google is throwing more money at its mobile research group, Advanced Technology and Projects. With the decision, however, “Google … is embracing a leaner, faster way to find the next big thing,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Among other efficiencies associated with the research group, “Most projects are limited to two years, after which they are killed.” 

Despite a ton of buzz, live-video app Meerkat isn’t fairing so well compared to other popular apps. In Meerkat’s defense, “Founder and CEO Ben Rubin says the company was featured in [Apple’s] app store for a week, saw a huge spike in downloads, and is now simply back to where it began,” The Verge reports. Yet, according to the tech news source: “Meerkat's popularity is sliding because its hype got ahead of its actual traction.” 

Adobe just released a new iPad app named Slate, which it’s positioning as an easy way for tech novices to create Web-based reports, newsletters and the like. Think of Slate like a layout version of Adobe's Voice app,” Engadget suggests. “The software that debuted last year with a collection of templates for quickly producing video.” 

Anonymous messaging app Yik Yak is testing a photo-sharing feature. “Yik Yak is in the early stages of testing the feature on some college campuses for limited periods of time, sometimes as brief as several hours,” Mashable reports. According to Yik Yak CEO Tyler Droll: “Yakkers have told us that they’d love the option of adding a picture to their yak.” 

Mobile live-streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat need to do something about their real-time comment features, Alexis Madrigal writes in Fusion. Writing about bother services, he calls “the difficulty of keeping up with a flood of real-time comments” a significant problem. Testing Periscope, he notes: “As the people started piling into the Periscope room and the comments started flying around … I realized that I could not maintain my line of thought.”