Arguably adding to Facebook’s “creepy” factor, The Verge suggests that the social giant is far better at indentifying human faces than the FBI’s new Next Generation Identification (NGI) face-recognition system. “Given a suspect's face, NGI returns a ranked list of 50 possibilities, and only promises an 85 percent chance of returning the suspect's name,” The Verge reports. Facebook, meanwhile, “can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether [two pictures are] the same person.” 

Despite its best efforts, Amazon’s subscription-video service continues to lag behind Netflix. “Of the 75 top-rated television shows over the last four seasons, Netflix currently offers 32% and Amazon’s Prime Instant Video has 12%,” Variety reports, citing a new analysis from Piper Jaffray & Co. Yet, “Netflix’s library of top TV shows from that time period declined 2% from June 2013 to June 2014, whereas Amazon increased its count of those shows by 5% in the past 12 months.” 

As it turns out, Facebook’s now infamous psychological research study appears to have been standard practice for the social giant. “The experiment was the work of Facebook's Data Science team, a group of about three dozen researchers with unique access to one of the world's richest data troves,” as The Wall Street Journal reports. “Until recently, the Data Science group operated with few boundaries,” WSJ reports, citing a former member of the team. 

Amid continued executive turnover at Twitter, the company’s success hinges more than ever on one man: Adam Bain, global president of revenue and partnerships, and, as The New York Times call him, the “lead money man since he took the job nearly four years ago.” Recently given control of business development at Twitter, “his role atop the moneymaking machine suggests that he might very well be the second most important person at the company after [CEO Dick] Costolo.”  

Del Harvey specializes in the dark side of social media. Officially vice president of trust and safety at Twitter, Forbes likens Harvey to “Silicon Valley’s chief sanitation officer, dealing with the dirtiest stuff on Twitter: spam, harassment, child exploitation, threats of rape and murder.” As such, Harvey is also at the center of the digital censorship and free speech debates about which everyone (including many in Washington) seem to have strong opinions. 

Facebook is testing a new type of ad product in India, which is built around missed phone calls. Now, “when a person in India sees an ad on Facebook, they can place a ‘missed call’ by clicking the ad from their mobile device,” The New Web reports. “In the return call, the user then gets access to content such as music, cricket scores or messages from celebrities, as well as a brand message from the advertiser -- without having to spend any airtime or data.” 

Finally apologizing for the psychological experiment that has so many critics crying foul, Facebook is admitting wrong. “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products,” but Facebook’s intentions were “poorly communicated,” Sheryl Sandberg said on Wednesday. “For that communication, we apologize,” Facebook’s COO said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. “We never meant to upset you.” 

ConnecTV is scooping up rival social TV startup TweetTV, and launching ClipADS -- a service to help brands and agencies make and distribute short video ads across social media sites. Not coming out of leftfield, ConnecTV was founded in 2010 by former heads of TV Guide and TiVo, TechCrunch notes. According to the startup: “For brands and networks the big data filtering and reporting capabilities of TweetTV integrated with ConnecTV’s viral advertising ClipADS provide a unique advantage in targeting social TV fans.”

Disputing Facebook’s defense of its “emotion manipulation” study, Forbes reports that the company’s Data Use Policy did not allow for such “research” back in 2012 when the study was conducted. “Some critics don’t think that throwing the word ‘research’ into a many-thousands-word-long data use policy is adequate for performing psychological experiments on users, but now it seems that Facebook hadn’t even done that,” according to Forbes.

There appear to be tweets with “Buy now” buttons circulating on Twitter. After spotting the tweets -- all of which feature products from Fancy.com -- Re/Code thinks they’re perhaps a sign that the micro-blogging leader is finally getting serious about ecommerce. “It would be difficult … for Fancy to include ‘Buy now’ buttons in a tweet without Twitter’s approval,” it writes. “So it’s likely that in-tweet shopping is here, or coming soon.”