Following a two-year run, Facebook is killing its Messenger service for Windows users. The decision appears to have caught Microsoft off guard. Indeed, “the news comes less than three days after Microsoft announced Facebook Messenger for Windows Phone would arrive in just a few weeks,” The Next Web reports. Meanwhile, “an OS X version [of Facebook Messenger] has been long expected, but that seems even less likely now.” 

Adding to their already cluttered News Feeds, Facebook users can now expect to see posts from Pages they don’t even follow. Now, if one Page tags another Page that a user likes or follows, the user can now be alerted to that fact in his or her News Feed. “Essentially, Facebook is just emulating the way it already handles mentions of friends,” CNet reports. “The social network is pitching the change as a way to help people ‘discover conversations around topics they've expressed interest in.’” 

Start venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has the seen the future of news and it’s one big sloppy Twitter stream. Oh, and it’s very healthy. “You are going to see it grow 10X to 100X from where it is today,” Andreessen writes in a rather long blog post. In part, that success will result from more rigorous business practices being applied to what have been questionable models. “A healthy business is the foundation for being able to build high quality products, and to do so sustainably.” Oh, and better advertising. 

Remarkably, not even Facebook can control how consumers communicate with friends and family. Take the case of its email service, which, after three unspectacular years, is getting the boot. "We're making this change because most people haven't been using their Facebook email address," a Facebook spokesperson tells BBC News. “The service was launched in November 2010 and billed as a way to streamline users' communication by providing a single inbox that could receive Facebook messages, SMS texts, and conventional emails.”  

Why do celebrities prefer Twitter to Facebook? Facebook has brought in Sibyl Goldman to help answer that question, and ingratiate the social giant with Hollywood as its new head of entertainment partnerships. Variety refers to Goldman as “Ryan Seacrest’s digital guru.” She most recently served as executive vice president of new media at Ryan Seacrest Productions. At Facebook, “She’ll be charged with building a bigger team focused on outreach efforts to studios, networks and celebrities.” 

In a spanning interview with Playboy, Gawker founder Nick Denton talks about his boldest attempt yet to upend the media business: Kinja. “Gawker's reliance on journalists is, he believes, a fatal weakness, one he means to correct with a new system called Kinja, which he is currently in the process of refining,” Jeff Bercovici reports for Playboy. “Part publishing platform, part social network, Kinja aims to do nothing less than turn Gawker Media's 80 million monthly readers into willing accomplices, a virtual nation of gossip reporters.” 

Though still shorthand for vanity and shallowness, the “selfie” has also become a focus for researchers across a number of academic fields. Wired catches up with one team of computer scientists, historians and designers gleaning some remarkable insights from the millions of self-portraits people are sharing online. Among young people, for instance, women tend to share more selfies, yet, past about 40, men tend to share more picture of themselves. 

Google reportedly offered to buy WhatsApp for $10 billion -- a little more than half of what Facebook ultimately agreed to pay for the mobile messaging app. Plus, “the bid did not come with promise of a board seat, unlike the Facebook agreement,” Fortune reports, citing sources. Prior to Facebook’s announcement on Wednesday, it was widely rumors that a number of tech giants were drooling over WhatsApp, its working business model, and its rapid adoption among younger consumers.  

It looks like Whisper just set itself apart from a cluster of other “anonymous” (or “anonymish”) social networks by breaking into the gossip game. Yes, the Sequoia-backed startup “may have just gotten its big break into celebrity gossip territory that’s typically dominated by the likes of TMZ and the National Enquirer,” TechCrunch reports. “While [the] news is about as shallow and silly as it comes, in a larger way, it reveals Whisper’s potential strategy for staying relevant in the notoriously fickle social app space.” 

Facebook’s recent algorithm tweak was widely seen as an attack on so-called “social publishers” like Upworthy and Viral, which exist to game the social network. While the move was supposed to promote more quality content in users’ news feeds, some Web watchers find the move unsettling. “It’s easy to read into this a slightly ominous message: This is Facebook’s Internet, and the media is just attempting to find a way to sustain itself in it,” Alex Pareene writes in Salon.com.