In private beta, Vine founder Dom Hofmann is testing his latest creation: Byte. “Byte is a creative tool and a social network,” The Verge explains. “Mostly, though, it’s a playground: if Vine encourages creativity by giving you constraints, Byte aims to destroy the notion of constraints and see what emerges from the chaos.” 

Twitch says that more than 21 million viewers caught coverage of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, i.e., E3, this month. “That's compared to about 12 million viewers in 2014 and 9.5 million the year before,” The Washington Post reports. “The success of Twitch, which Amazon bought for roughly $1 million last year, has shown how quickly the social video space has taken off in the world of video games.” 

Live-streaming app Meerkat has launched an embeddable player, enabling broadcasted content to the app to be embedded and viewed on other digital services. The first incarnation begins July 5 with the Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week. The player will use behind-the-scenes content on the channel’s DLive Web portal, as part of a roundup of streaming content. Shark Week content will also be pushed out to Meerkat users, via a @SharkWeek account, giving Discovery’s programming another digital outlet.

Kim Kardashian is clear about her Instagram policy:  The feed is off limits, a no-promo zone. If she does take photos with a product it's not because she gets paid, she said. "I know a lot of my brands might get frustrated that I don't promote maybe as much as they would like, but I only do it if it's authentic," she said.

Asking for a fight with European regulators, The BBC plans to list Web pages that Google removes from its search listings under “right to be forgotten” guidelines. “We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy,” Neil McIntosh, BBC Online’s managing editor, explains. “We think it is important that those with an interest in the ‘right to be forgotten’ can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling.” 

Facebook’s employees diversification efforts aren’t going so well, according to TechCrunch. “Facebook’s team is still dominated by white and Asian men,” it writes, citing independent research. Among other failings, “The 10,082-person company has only 1% more women as a share of all employees than a year ago despite a 40% increase in head count.” 

Publishers are finally ready to begin distributing their news stories using Facebook’s Instant Articles service, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources. “The New York Times is ready to publish about 30 articles per day directly to Facebook’s news feed and the Atlantic is prepared to make most of its content available through the program,” it writes. 

Facebook is testing an algorithm that can recognize people in photographs even when it can't clearly see their faces. “Instead it looks for other unique characteristics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose,” New Scientist reports. In tests, “the final algorithm was able to recognize [sic] individual people's identities with 83% accuracy.” 

At least for now, regulators’ concerns over facial-recognition technology will keep Facebook’s new photo-sharing app Moments out of Europe. “The Moments app … uses facial-recognition technology to identify people and group the images based on who is in each photo,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “Facebook must reach an agreement with its regulator in Ireland on how to offer the technology to residents of the European Union.” 

As Twitter tries to reinvent itself as a more relevant service for more people, Wired wonders what went wrong. “Twitter has been co-opted by people who saw a global billboard service rather than a messaging tool,” it writes. “It is an inscrutable mix of breaking news, valuable commentary, horrible trolling, and brands saying bae to get you to eat chicken nuggets.” Adds Wired: “Twitter became a victim of what you could call the Reputation Economy.”