Casting a shadow over its nascent virtual reality business, Facebook just lost Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Beyond wishing Luckey the best, the social giant isn't discussing the details of his departure, or its broader implications.

Character limits have always been Twitter's defining, er, characteristic. In recent years, however, the platform has taken measures to loosen its original limitations on user expression. Giving users a little more leeway, Twitter will no longer count @usernames -- when replying to another user group -- toward tweets' 140-character limit.

Trying to attract more publishing and marketing partners, Twitter just added an analytics dashboard to Periscope. The new services "gives broadcasters an in-depth look at their viewership and engagement on their videos over time," a company spokeswoman said on Wednesday. Periscope is also adding an Activity Tab, which should help publish track follows, the number of people watching their replayed video, and so forth.

Trying to improve its revenue forecast, Twitter is going to start selling pre-roll ads against Periscope video. At least for now, the new ad units will only appear before Periscope videos that run within Twitter's platform, a company spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

Combine Snapchat's support and the glee people feel when making their own personalized emojis, and what do you get? The fastest-growing app in the country, of course! Unless you reside under a rock, you know I'm talking about Bitmoji -- the emoji personalization app that Snap bought (as an asset of parent company Bitstrips) in March of 2016 for a reported $100 million or so.

In another bid to boost its bottom line, Twitter is pondering a premium Tweetdeck-like service for professionals willing to pay for social insights. "We're exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals," a company spokeswoman said in a statement on Friday. If and when Twitter launches such a service, it will likely feature social-activity tracking and planning tools similar to those offered by SocialFlow and HootSuite.

Blame Google or not, but Android has long lagged behind Apple when it comes to mobile malware protection. Pointing to fresh internal findings, however, the search giant says Android users are safer than ever.

Despite the obvious privacy issues, Google just threw Maps into the deep end of the world of real-time media and communication. Google Maps users will soon be able to share their current location, travel route and estimated arrival time with friends and family.

Sorry, Snap, but Apple just gave iOS users one less reason to employ their Snapchat apps. Now, iOS users who want to share videos with captions can choose Apple's Clips. With the Clips app, people can share multimedia videos with friends through their Messages app, along with Instagram, Facebook and other popular social channels.

Siri and her ilk have some fresh competition from Bixby, Samsung's new digital assistant. Debuted on Monday, Bixby isn't just another friendly voice, according to InJong Rhee, head of R&D at Samsung's software and services division. On the contrary, Samsung's creation is "fundamentally different" from rival assistants, Rhee promises.