Phone calls have gone the way of the rotary dial, right? The signs are everywhere, it seems. We're all texting and messaging our head's off. Even Drake's upset about some lady friend not calling anymore. Actually, that's not the case. Across all ages and races, the number of calls we make and receive has stayed relatively stable this year, according to new findings from Nielsen Mobile Insights.

Listening to some of the panels at MediaPost's OMMA Chicago conference the past two days, one would think the mobile advertising world is in for a revolution."The mobile experience is disgusting!" exclaimed one panelist. Others called mobile ads crappy and lamented the decline of artfulness in modern digital advertising.

Despite Jony Ive's best efforts, the Apple Watch has hardly achieved must-have status among many people. Yet that doesn't mean the future of mobile won't be "wearable."On the contrary, U.S. consumers are slowly but surely strapping on Apple Watches and other connected gadgets in what is looking more like an evolution than a revolution.

For Facebook, Notifications were always a brilliant way to get people to spend more time on its app without coming off as pushy or self-serving. So, it makes perfect sense that the social giant is expanding its Notification system to include birthdays, life events, upcoming events, sports scores, and TV programming reminders.

Over the next year or two, consumer-facing businesses will carefully rethink the notion of personalization -- or find themselves up a creek. That's the gist of some new findings from Cliff Condon, chief research and product officer at Forrester Research. And it almost goes without saying that mobile sits at the center of this personalization revolution.

You can shower people with ads, use their data for all sorts of secretive purposes, and split their service into a bunch of different apps. Just don't mess with their phone's battery life. After learning that lesson the hard way, Facebook has issued a mea culpa, including a promise that its latest iOS app update will stop sucking the life out of users' iPhones.

Twitter needs to get some wheels spinning, and fast. The same day that Jack Dorsey made his first big appearance as CEO at Twitter's Flight developer conference, Morgan Stanley downgraded Twitter's stock to "underweight," with a price target about 20% lower than the $30 it's trading at now. Developers (who figured big in Twitter's strategy early on, only to be snubbed as management changed their minds) are a key component to making the social giant competitive for both users and investors.

To the chagrin of its rivals -- and any publisher trying to preserve a direct connection with readers -- Facebook just expanded the reach of Instant Articles.

It's the billion-dollar question: Can Google thrive in an increasingly mobile world? At present, there are some signs that the search giant is in trouble. Last week, I mentioned that Apple's mobile OS and app businesses was beating Google's. Now comes word that a full 50% of mobile users don't use their devices to search.

Facebook's freakin' me out, man! I just want to kill some time with a couple cute cat videos, wish my buddy a very "HBD!" and like my nephew's latest selfie. Now, in a disconcerting post published over the weekend, Facebook says it's going to start informing me if my account "has been targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state."