Internet.org is launching an Android and Web app with free data access to select services, including Facebook, Messenger, Wikipedia and Google Search. First launching in Zambia, Facebook’s ambitious initiative is headed to additional developing countries in the coming months. “The Facebook Zero has been giving the developing world access to a stripped down version of Facebook since 2010,” TechCrunch notes. “But this new Internet.org app with other services will be available as a compact, standalone Android app.” 

Facebook is giving up on Gifts. Next month, the social giant plans to stop selling gift cards for businesses like Starbucks and iTunes, and refocus its ecommerce energies on its new Buy button, and other initiatives.  Since its launch in 2012, “The gifting experience just didn’t fit naturally into Facebook,” TechCrunch writes. “By selling ads and potentially charging a revenue share for products bought through the Buy button, Facebook could make plenty of money on commerce without having to host its own Gifts store or bombard people with Gifts prompts on their friends’ birthdays.” 

Snapchat is presently rounding up several investors, including Alibaba Group Holding, for another cash infusion, which would value the messaging startup at $10 billion. That’s what sources tell Bloomberg. “The talks are ongoing and the terms of the funding may change,” it reports. To date, Snapchat has raised roughly $100 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Benchmark, and Institutional Venture Partners, among others.

As part of a broader mobile redesign, LinkedIn is more thoroughly personalizing user profiles with various contextual information. “Profiles now have a completely overhauled ‘in common’ section that displays contextual information about experiences, connections or groups you share with other users,” Mashable reports. “The extra info aims to make it easier to initiate conversations with other users.” 

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter was prepping new metrics that put its value in a different light and lessened the significance of its sluggish monthly active user numbers. But the social giant won’t debut any new metrics along with its second-quarter earnings, Re/Code reports. “While Twitter has had internal discussions about new ways of measuring the service … people familiar with the company say it won’t offer up those numbers on Tuesday.” 

Photo-sharing network Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom has he has an unprecedented amount of control over photo ads before they go up on the service. "I'm looking at every ad," Systrom told the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference at the Aspen Institute on Tuesday. "We implemented that early on." He added that he had the power to reject or suggest changes to the content. Instagram tentatively rolled out its first 10 ad campaigns late last year. Advertisers include Airbnb, Burberry, Ben and Jerry's and Lexus.

An ad for a new app called Bolt mysteriously appeared on Instagram  Wednesday. The button was a dead link and the ads were removed shortly after they appeared, per The Verge. Instagram could be testing app-install ads, or Instagram and Facebook have another new app in the pipeline, and accidentally shared the news before it was ready.

Like a number of tech leaders before it, Twitter this week acknowledged an embarrassing lack of diversity among its ranks. “Overall, Twitter reported a 70% male workforce, with 90% of tech positions filled by men,” The Los Angeles Times reports. In a statement, Twitter executive Janet Van Huysse said: “We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity -- and we are no exception.”

Captain's log: Facebook Mentions sucks. Yep, that’s the word from the starship captain himself, William Shatner, who took to Tumblr this week to trash Facebook’s new app. As Shatner explains (we strongly suggest reading this quote in Shatner’s famously uneven speech pattern): “I’m not quite sure why Facebook released this app for ‘celebrities’ … It seems to be ill conceived … I will probably use it to post to my Facebook when I’m on my phone but it doesn’t allow for mail or groups … I will continue to use my regular Facebook App as well as the Pages app.”

By many accounts, Google+ is a total failure. Yet, according to The Atlantic, the engineers behind Google’s social network have developed what could be the coolest photo editing tool on the market. “The product is called Stories, and it takes photos users upload and automatically packages them up into narratives,” The Atlantic reports. “Maybe that sounds easy, but that's because you're a human,” it notes. “Teaching a machine a sense of narrative and place isn't quite so easy, even using all of the information that Google knows about a user.”