In the UK, Facebook just partnered up with social TV analytics company SecondSync. “The two companies will work together to help marketers understand how people are using the social network to talk about topics such as TV,” The Next Web reports. “The partnership is a big deal because it means Facebook’s social TV data will be made available outside the company for the first time.” 

Facebook on Thursday gave the world its first peek at Paper -- the social giant’s most ambitious content service ever. Paper is “a mobile application that entirely re-envisions how Facebook users discover -- and create -- much of the content flowing through the massive social network,” ReCode writes. Set to launch soon, “the stand-alone app is … an attempt to aesthetically and thematically rethink how Facebook presents itself to users.” 

Medium, Evan Williams’ media start-up, just raised $25 million from a long list of investors, including from Greylock Partners, Google Ventures, SV Angel’s Ron Conway, Michael Ovitz, Peter Chernin, and Gary Vaynerchuk. “This … marks the first time that Medium -- a blogging product that sits somewhere in between Williams’s previous companies Twitter and Blogger -- has taken capital from outside venture firms since its founding,” ReCode reports. 

Say ‘So long’ to IntoNow, the second-screen app that Yahoo bought in 2011. “IntoNow was one of the many second-screen TV apps that popped up in the early part of the decade, offering users the ability to ‘check in’ to the television shows they were watching and share their viewing habits with others on social networks that people actually used, like Facebook and Twitter,” TechCrunch writes. “The idea was as preposterous then as it seems now.” 

Yahoo is reportedly about ready to pay $16 million for business app developer Tomfoolery. Led by Kakul Srivastava, a former Yahoo engineer, Tomfoolery aims to “help co-workers socialize and collaborate in the same way they do with friends on sites like Facebook,” The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog reports. “Their first software program, Anchor, lets groups of colleagues share files and discuss work projects using simple apps for iPhones and Android.”

As it turns out, people just love giving money to friends, family, and complete strangers -- so long as the recipients have articulated a clear vision for the investment on a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter. As such, Indiegogo, another fund-raising site, just raised $40 in a Series B round of venture financing led by IVP and Kleiner Perkins. “The infusion of money adds another notch of credibility and legitimacy to crowdfunding,” The New York Times’ Bits blog writes. 

Is Twitter experiencing a fundamental existential shift? The New York Times’ Bits blogger Jenna Wortham thinks so. “Twitter seems to have reached a turning point, a phase in which its contributors have stopped trying to make the service as useful as possible for the crowd, and are instead trying to distinguish themselves from one another,” she writes. “It’s less about drifting down the stream, absorbing what you can while you float, and more about trying to make the flashiest raft to float on, gathering fans and accolades as you go.” 

Spicing up its interface, Pinterest now supports animated GIFs on the Web, and will soon extend the functionality to mobile. “GIFs have been popular on the Web for some time, but until now, Tumblr has been the social service best known for GIF sharing,” according to TechCrunch. “With Pinterest’s support, that could change. (Especially with Tumblr traffic looking flat these days.)” 

This past week, some Princeton PhDs got a lot of Web watchers to sit up in their chairs by suggesting that Facebook would implode by 2017. In response, Facebook’s data scientists have employed the PhDs’ own methodology to prove that Princeton is on track to lose its entire student body by 2021. “The critical error in the non-peer-reviewed study is stating that since the volume of [Google] searches for ‘Facebook’ began declining in 2012, it must mean there’s an ongoing decline in Facebook usage,” TechCrunch writes. “Searches … declining doesn’t prove much considering over half of Facebook’s traffic now comes …

NewsCred has raised a $25 million funding round led by InterWest partners, which brings its total funding to $45 million since 2008. Why are investors pumping so much money into NewsCred and similar “content marketing” companies? “Advertisers have spent the last few years toiling away in the social media fields, and now have long lists of followers on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to show for their efforts,” Recode explains. “New problem: Finding something to say to those followers.”