Despite its best efforts -- and seemingly unlimited resources -- Google’s social media failures continue to pile up. After languishing for years, the search giant has finally decided to kill its first social network, Orkut. “The platform will be formally closed on September 30, after which users will be unable to log in or export their photo albums to Google+,” The Next Web reports. “Google says it’ll be focusing its efforts on YouTube, Blogger and Google+ moving forward.”  

Expanding on an exclusive partnership, Bing is about to beef up its user of Twitter in search results. “Tweets have been showing up in Bing search results for some time,” Search Engine Land reports. “With Bing’s latest round of new Twitter-related search features, users now can perform hashtag searches to find topics trending on the social media platform, as well as search for specific Twitter handles and celebrity-related tweets.”  

While academia, media types and the public continue to debate the ethics of Facebook’s psychological research study -- the one that secretly turned 689,003 users’ New Feeds positive or negative to see if it would impact them emotionally -- Facebook remains nonplused by all the fuss. “This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person’s Facebook account,” a Facebook spokesperson tells Forbes. Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill calls the response “tone deaf.”  

Pursuing new revenue streams, Foursquare Labs plans to start charging some businesses for access to its database of local venues. The start-up is already “negotiating with the heaviest users of its data to pay fees or offer services in return,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Deals will be reached on an ad-hoc basis with each developer and will affect under 1% of the 63,000 companies that use Foursquare's database.” 

Facebook continues to fight the Manhattan district attorney’s office over the government’s demand for the contents of Facebook accounts. “Facebook argues that Manhattan prosecutors last summer violated the constitutional right of its users to be free of unreasonable searches by demanding nearly complete account data on 381 people, ranging from pages they had liked to photos and private messages,” The New York Times reports, citing confidential legal documents. 

Facebook is giving UK users more than 70 new gender options from which to identify themselves. “The new gender options (around 50 of which were first introduced in the U.S. in February) include androgynous, trans person, polygender and cisgender - with users also able to suggest their own additions,” The Independent reports. Said Simon Milner, Facebook’s policy director in the UK: “It’s all about Facebook enabling people to be themselves.” 

The latest tech giant to disclose the diversity (or lack thereof) of its employees, Facebook on Thursday said its workforce is 69% male, and 91% white or Asian. “The numbers from the Menlo Park-based company are in line with those from Yahoo, Google and LinkedIn, which made similar disclosures in the past month,” Bloomberg News reports. “The figures highlight a lack of minorities and women at all of the companies.” 

Snapchat just poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall. “He worked with Facebook’s biggest developer partners to help brands run ads, publish content through Pages, build apps, and analyze the results,” TechCrunch reports. Randall has already joined the popular messaging service – and Facebook rival -- as vice president of business and marketing partnerships. 

Tweaking its interface just so, Twitter is now giving users more space to comment when retweeting another user. “‘Retweet with Comment’ surfaces the retweeted message as an image, leaving users with just under 140-characters to share their own thoughts,” Mashable notes. “Previously, if someone wanted to add their own commentary to a retweet, they could click ‘Quote Tweet’ to do so.” Twitter has also begun positioning images above a tweet's text rather that below it. 

Slingshot made its international debut, this week, which followed Facebook’s domestic launch of the Snapchat-like messaging service. "Since we launched last week, we’ve heard from lots of people around the world who are excited to give Slingshot a try,” the Slingshot team said in a blog post. As The Guardian notes: “Unlike Poke, Facebook's first attempt to clone Snapchat, [Slingshot] doesn't require a Facebook account to use.”