When his first child arrives, Mark Zuckerberg plans to take two months of parental leave, Facebook’s CEO revealed in a Friday blog post. “The post implied that he’ll be stepping away from the office for two consecutive months -- a pretty significant amount of time,” Re/Code writes. “The decision is a personal one, but … Zuckerberg is in an interesting position as a leader in the tech community.”

With the daily deal industry on life support, The New York Times visits deal king LivingSocial to see what has come of one of the tech world’s first unicorns. “Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn,” it writes. “Consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled,” while the company’s work force has shrunk from 4,500 to about 800.

Buzzfeed’s Alex Kantrowitz got to test out M -- the artificial intelligence-driven virtual assistant that Facebook is currently building into its Messenger app. Among other implications, “If Facebook offers businesses the technology behind M, it would make it even more enticing for them to conduct business through Messenger,” Kantrowitz writes. “This could turn Messenger into a hub for online commerce, with a little M sitting inside each business.”

Earlier this week, Tinder CEO Sean Rad gave the mother of all bad interviews to the London Evening Standard. It was so bad that Tinder parent Match Group distanced itself from the interview in an SEC filing related to its public offering. “The statement particularly emphasized that the analyst numbers on Tinder’s users that were cited in the article were not kosher,” Re/Code reports.

Continuing its global retreat, Groupon has reportedly pulled out of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. “The news comes amid a difficult period at Groupon, which has laid off 1,100 employees, exited several other markets, missed on earnings and changed CEOs -- all in the last couple of months,” TechCrunch reports.

YouTube Shopping has officially launched ad formats for retailers, Marketing Land reports. They are now available to all advertisers in AdWords. “TrueView for Shopping and Shopping ads on YouTube can be set up directly in the AdWords UI,” it notes. “First introduced in May, TrueView for Shopping ads allow merchants to show Shopping ads for their own products in their own videos.”

Marketers, PR firms and ad agencies are increasingly using social media to place messages in front of journalists and media professionals, The Wall Street Journal reports. “This concept of targeting ads to ‘influencers’ in certain fields is not a new one, but marketers say the increasingly granular targeting tools being offered by companies such as Facebook and Twitter are allowing them to get more sophisticated with their efforts.”

Fast Company has a big cover story on Mark Zuckerberg and the future of Facebook. “Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on three major technology initiatives,” FC writes. “One is developing advanced artificial intelligence that can help Facebook understand what matters to users.” The others are virtual reality, and connecting the rest of the world to the Web.

Storyful -- the News Corp-owned social news agency -- is using messaging app Slack in a novel way. “A group of Storyful staffers … came to the realization that they could use Slack for another purpose: To deliver content to clients,” Nieman Lab reports. Says Storyful product lead Alexandra Pressland: “It’s putting content into a really useful pre-made notification format.”

Twitter appears to be testing a ‘ScratchReel’ -- a new feature that lets user rewind certain GIFs. “ScratchReels are GIFs that can be scrubbed using a finger or a mouse cursor,” The Next Web notes. “We don’t know if the feature will be coming to all GIFs on the platform, however … That’s a shame, as we think it’s pretty neat.”