In addition to its main purposes of disseminating cat pictures and getting stupid people fired, social media can actually do useful things like advancing the state of medical knowledge. In the latest such initiative, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has joined forces with PatientsLikeMe to gather information about drug side effects and adverse reactions.

Facebook is quickly becoming a preferred platform for publishing original content, including news and now entertainment. This week Amazon Studios announced that it will debut the pilot episode of a new series, the British comedy "Catastrophe," on its Facebook page rather than its own Web site.

Following its acquisition of Instagram in 2012, Facebook has for the most part avoided tinkering with the photo-sharing social network, but as many readers have doubtless noticed that changed this week with a major redesign of the desktop and mobile sites. The new aesthetic, which brings the sites up to date with the app, focuses on bigger pictures, displayed in a less cluttered environment, with simpler navigation and fewer visual distractions in the background.

A growing number of consumers are turning to social media to resolve customer service issues -- but companies are frequently failing to live up to their expectations, or indeed provide even minimal services via social media, according to a new study from The Northridge Group titled "The State of Customer Service 2015."

In addition to possibly taking a bite out of the streaming music business, the new Apple Music app unveiled on Tuesday may well come to dominate music-related social media thanks to its new social network feature, Connect, which provides a place for musicians and fans to communicate about the music they love. Connect could even become a platform for music publishing, giving the beleaguered traditional music industry yet another thing to worry about.

Video is exploding on Facebook, whose1.3 billion users were viewing over four billion videos per day as of April, up from three billion per day just three months before. Advertisers are understandably eager to reach these ravenous hordes of video viewers, but many brands, smaller agencies, and local businesses don't have the resources or facilities to produce suitable (non-embarrassing) video ads on their own.

Actually, you probably will. Here we are, a good ten years or more into the social media era, and apparently we still can't figure out whether social media advertising actually accomplishes anything, and if so, what.

With an eye to extending its reach in the developing world, Facebook has launched a new version of its Android app called "Facebook Lite," which uses much less data by paring down the social network to its essential functions. That should make it much more accessible for people with older devices, limited mobile data plans, or who live in areas with patchy coverage, including large parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

While ISIS members aspire to "martyrdom," this may not have been quite the glorious end they were seeking: earlier this year the U.S. Air Force destroyed one of the terrorist group's headquarters after being tipped off by a social media post, according to Defense Tech, citing a speech by Air Force General Hawk Carlisle (and if that isn't a great name for a USAF commander, I don't know what is).

The times they are a-changin', although it's not clear if that's a good thing. Most millennials, ages 18-33, (61%) say they get their political news from Facebook, according to the latest data from the Pew Research Center, while 37% get their political news from local TV. These are almost exactly reverse the proportions for baby boomers, ages 50-68, with 60% saying they get their political news from local TV, compared to 39% for Facebook.