A costly trademark dispute with Twitter is killing photo-sharing service Twitpic. “According to founder Noah Everett, the social network threatened to revoke Twitpic's API access if it didn't drop a trademark application,” PC Magazine reports. In a blog post, Everett writes: “This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009.” 

Twitter CFO Anthony Noto says improving search and testing relevancy algorithms are top priorities for the microblogging giant. “This is related to Twitter’s larger aim to better organize its content -- to separate the interesting and timely tweets from the noise,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Twitter also needs to reconsider organizing its timeline in reverse chronological order, Noto said this week. “The CFO also hinted that group chats might be in the pipeline,” WSJ reports. 

Do women want a social network all to themselves? Betting on it, former Facebook staffer Susan Johnson is developing Women.com. Still in private beta mode, the network “encourages women to pose questions to the community … upvote the most relevant answers; and, if all goes according to plan, engage in the type of real talk that doesn’t surface on massive social networks like Facebook,” reports Slate.com.

The Guardian’s Emily Bell argues that society would be wise to not let social networks decide what news we are each exposed to. As it stands, “The most powerful distributor of news now is not News Corp trucks or Tesco,” Bell admits. “It is an algorithm governing how items are displayed to the billion active users on Facebook.” Among other necessary adjustments, “Platforms that want public trust should be employing many more journalists than they presently do and using their knowledge to imbue automated process with values,” according to Bell.