Facebook stickers designer leaves company + MORE

Hackers have their hackathons — and now bloggers have a blogathon.
The first-ever Viralheat Blogathon happens August 1 in San Francisco. Put on by social media marketing company Viralheat, it is modeled after the hackathons held in the Bay Area and worldwide, in which developers compete to see who can create the best app or solve the toughest computing problem in a day…

Shortly after Facebook launched stickers for desktop chat, news circulated that it lost one of the minds behind the popular messaging feature. TechCrunch and AllFacebook reported that Sophie Xie, the designer who started the sticker craze at a hackathon, has moved from Facebook.
According to TechCrunch, Xie left Facebook to work on a bespoke hyper-local location app…

Once again, Facebook for Every Phone is the most-liked Facebook page — and by a wide margin, according to PageData. The page, which helps Facebook’s feature phone users, has more than 263 million fans on Facebook, dwarfing the company’s own Facebook page.
Singer Rihanna is the most popular person on Facebook, trailed closely by rapper Eminem…

Twitter confirmed that it’s testing a tool that will automatically translate tweets using Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The company hopes this will make it easier for people around the world to connect with each other as well as their favorite brands.
The company originally began testing this tool back in February 2012, but it seems like the experimentation is still ongoing…

This afternoon, Twitter announced that, for the first time, it will be granting advertisers access to users’ email addresses and browser-related information in order to better target promoted content.
Concerned about the privacy of your data? Keep reading.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media…

Smartphones may comprise a majority of mobile-phone shipments worldwide, but a sizeable number of handset users still prefer basic feature phones
Nokia catered to the latter market on Wednesday by debuting two 3G-capable feature phones — the 207 and 208 — that are specifically designed to provide users with quick Internet access…

Mozilla just released its first official handsets running Firefox OS in Spain, but 7digital has already jumped in and launched its own digital music marketplace for the emerging mobile operating system.
The 7digital Music Store is now available worldwide in the Firefox Marketplace, with a fully localized offering in Europe and North America…

Are you getting the most from your Google+ presence? Are you looking for ways to improve your Google+ engagement? Well look no further. In this article I’ll share five ways you can improve your Google+ experience. Why Google+? Because Google+ isn’t just a social network–it’s part of a powerful social platform that integrates with key […

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Twitter will allow marketers to target ads to users who have previously interacted with their websites, the company said today.
“Users won’t see more ads on Twitter, but they may see better ones,” wrote Kevin Weil, senior director of product for revenue, on the company’s blog…

Today, TechCrunch has learned that Quarterly.co, a subscription giftbox service that features monthly instalments curated by respected entrepreneurs, designers and organizations is buying 12Society, a rival startup with a similar, celebrity-endorsed approach to subscription commerce. Terms of the deal are not yet being disclosed, although a source tells us that it’s a small cash and equity deal that is expected to officially close in the next week or two and will lead to the closure of 12Society this summer…

Facebook appears to be testing a new ad unit on mobile (sponsored apps in the bookmarks bar) and has started putting birthday notifications in the mobile News Feed, accompanied by a prompt to buy that person a Gift. Tapping the Gift prompt (usually tailored to what a user has liked on Facebook) will lead to the user being led to purchase a Facebook gift for the person celebrating a birthday…