While the numbers may tell a different story, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo insists that the network has broad consumer appeal. “Everyone wants to know and stay up-to-date on what’s happening in their world and be connected and know what’s going on,” he tell The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo. “That’s what Twitter provides.” One big misconception, according to Costolo, is that one has tweet to get value out of Twitter. “I think that irrespective of whether you want to tweet, everyone can get value out of Twitter right away.” 

Twitter this week finally released a WordPress plugin so publishers can more easily add tweety features to their Web sites. Among other options, WordPress publishers can now add Twitter Cards, “which extend Twitter’s 140-character display with thumbnail images, headlines and subheads, can be automatically generated for each of a site’s pages,” Marketing Land reports. They can also “tie into Twitter’s advertising system with conversion tracking support and the ability to create tailored audiences with a WordPress macro.” 

Microsoft is removing Google and Facebook chat from its Outlook.com email service. The software giant says it’s nixing Google Talk integration "due to Google’s decision to discontinue the chat protocol used by the Google Talk platform." Meanwhile, “Microsoft will also be discontinuing support for Facebook chat in Outlook.com, but the company has not revealed why it’s killing off the social network’s chat integration,” The Verge reports. “Microsoft is now pushing customers to use Skype in Outlook.com.” 

Snapchat is drawing the ire of colleges and universities around the country for helping students sully their images with inappropriate content. “Since social-messaging platform Snapchat rolled out their Stories feature, campus-specific conversations are going far beyond simple self portraits,” USA Today reports. The feature has even led to legal concerns for some schools. “The legal concerns arise from -- among other issues -- violations of Snapchat guidelines.” 

Twitter’s trying desperately to attract average users, many of whom regard the social network as puzzling and purposeless. “For users that use Twitter and are able to set up an account and follow the right people, we hear over and over that it provides really disproportionate value for them,” Alex Roetter, the company’s VP of engineering, tells TechCrunch. “What [VP of product Kevin Weil] and I are focused on is really building products for our users so that it’s easier for everyone to get into that state.” 

A growing number of Twitter users are employing various methods to erase their tweet history after short periods of time. “Most tweet-deleters, though, are not trying to protect themselves from a dark past,” Fusion reports. “Instead, they want their Twitter accounts to reflect their present states of mind and interests.” For whatever reason, it appears to be catching on. On service, TweetDelete, now boasts about 1.3 million users. 

Facebook is reconfiguring its more popular apps for virtual reality, its head of product, Chris Cox, said at a conference this week. “Cox didn't describe the apps in detail, but imagined a world where users will be able to share their current environment with other users using an app,” The Verge reports. Facebook dropped about $2 billion on virtual reality technology startup Oculus VR for $2 billion, last year. 

Powered by the sheer scale of social media activity, today, public shaming has gotten totally out of hand, Jon Ronson argues in The New York Times Magazine. Early on, “the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective,” the author say of online shaming. Yet, “As time passed … I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive.”           

Around the world, roughly 1.4 billion people trust Facebook to serve as secure scrapbook for their lives. But, as one security research discovered, the platform isn’t as secure as users assume. As the Naked Security blog reports, Laxman Muthiyah recently figured out how to delete “every one of those hundreds of billions of images” on Facebook. Luckily for over a billion trusting consumers, “He reported the bug to Facebook as soon as he found it, netting himself a cool $12,500 USD bug bounty in return.” 

The source of much criticism, Twitter is increasingly sensitive about its user growth, or lack thereof. “There’s no metric more important to the social network,” Re/Code writes. As such, the social giant has apparently decided to hide user growth from its own employees. “The company used to grant all employees access to its [monthly active user] figure through an internal intranet, but that access was revoked a few weeks ago,” Re/Code reports, citing sources. “Now, the MAU metric is only available on a need-to-know basis.”