Steve Case’ $20M investment in Lolly Wolly Doodle proves the value of social commerce + MORE

Twitter must reveal the users behind a series of anti-Semitic posts after a French court decided Thursday not to hear the company’s appeal of an earlier decision.
Several French groups sued Twitter last year, demanding it reveal the identities of users who posted anti-Jewish messages. In January, the Paris High Court ruled in favor of the French groups, deciding the messages violated French laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial…

Facebook announced today that it plans to eliminate its sponsored search results as part of its recent push to streamline its advertising products.
Launched last August, the ad unit allowed businesses to run ads in the typeahead results that appear when members enter a search query. Although early sponsored results campaigns received a positive response, the company said it noticed that other ad types were used to achieve the same goal more effectively…

Last week, Facebook announced that it will be streamlining the ad-buying process by eliminating more than half of its 27 ad units. Today it’s taking one step towards that goal by announcing that it will be eliminating the Sponsored Results unit starting in July.
The unit officially launched in August 2012, allowing businesses to run ads in the “typeahead” results that show up when users enter a search query…

Fitness applications are growing in popularity — largely because they work well, especially when a user connects the app to their Facebook account. While it’s difficult to measure Facebook-connected fitness apps’ success in terms of pounds lost, developers are claiming that users who sign into the app through Facebook tend to keep using it…

Parse, which Facebook acquired in April to boost its mobile development, announced a major milestone Thursday: 100,000 apps built on the platform. Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar announced this on the company blog:
We’re really proud to announce today that we’ve had over 100,000 apps built on the Parse platform, up from 80,000 apps at the end of April…

BlackBerry today released the much-anticipated beta release of the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and Plug-in for Android Development Tools for BlackBerry 10.2. That’s a mouthful, but all you really have to know is that the new version adds the Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean runtime; you can download the latest release now directly from BlackBerry Developer…

While Facebook continues to streamline its advertising options after rolling out Graph Search, a recent report from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud shows that the remaining ad units deliver more bang per buck with the help of social context.
In its Facebook Ads Benchmark Report, Salesforce crunched the numbers on more than one million ad units and over 114 billion impressions on its marketing dashboard, social…

Facebook has added 28 new jobs to its careers page including a number of positions in developer relations and strategic development.
After listing the position of strategic partner development for influencers, Facebook has added more positions specific to an industry. For example, it has added Strategic Partner Development for photographers, politics and journalists…

In January, we shared a tweet from Twitter Principal Designer Josh Brewer calling for “a few good men & women” to join the design team.
Twitter’s design department continues to expand – but will do so without Brewer at its helm. After three years with the company, he’s taking off…

AOL founder Steve Case’s investment company just put $20 million into a little known kids clothing manufacturer in Lexington, North Carolina. But more interesting than the massive investment into the tiny company is the fact that this is a major, major endorsement of a version of social commerce that actually works…

Have you ever been asked to show the return on investment (ROI) for your social media work? Have you had trouble giving an exact number to explain your ROI or even set quantitative goals for your social media? 25% of marketers said that their biggest marketing challenge was finding the ROI of their marketing activities…

Facebook users have made it clear that they want more control over their privacy. The company’s investors said that repeatedly during Facebook’s first shareholders meeting, and the latest Android mobile app update shows that the site is working on more ways to get privacy controls in the users’ hands…

As part of its recent advertising simplification push, Facebook is eliminating its sponsored search results ad unit. A Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook that the reason why the sponsored results will be nixed is because the most common marketers for them were app and game developers, and Facebook feels that the mobile app install ads and page post link ads are more efficient ways to reach this goal…