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Gibson Security, a group of anonymous hackers from Australia, has published a new report with detailed coding that they say shows how a vulnerability can be exploited to reveal phone numbers of users, as well as their privacy settings. “Snapchat has a feature where it will grab all the numbers from your address book, upload them to their server [which is pretty bad by itself] and suggests you friends,” a spokesman for Gibson Security told Guardian Australia. “We discovered that if you were to go through and scan single phone number through this find friends function you could essentially obtain the phone number of a Snapchat user.”

“Internet Everywhere means that our old conception of the world separated into an online and an offline space is no longer relevant. Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it,” Spiegel said. But constant connectivity means there’s no longer a disconnect between when media is taken and when it could be shared. Or, as Spiegel said, “We no longer have to capture the ‘real world’ and recreate it online – we simply live and communicate at the same time.”

“The selfie makes sense as the fundamental unit of communication on Snapchat because it marks the transition between digital media as self-expression and digital media as communication,” he said.

advertising technology called remarketing has proven alienating to online consumers. Remarketing, which lets advertisers follow someone around the Internet with a display ad, based on a previous search engine query, specific site visit, or other online action by the user, has increased in popularity in recent years.

The rapid spread of SnapChat--the picture sharing app that auto-deletes photos after ten seconds--shows that young people increasingly understand the need to keep some things secret, or at least to control the visibility and content of their communications. The migration of Millennials away from Facebook to the more anonymous Tumblr may be another sign. And the outcry raised by young Tumblr users in the wake of news that Yahoo! was purchasing the platform--driven by fears of more corporate control and increased advertising--only underscores the point.

Millennials are in the vanguard of mainstream online behavior: they were first on Facebook (after college students invited to the join in its earliest days), followed by their parents. A Millennial move towards greater online secrecy could represent the beginning of a larger shift that warrants additional research.

Facebook announced the purchase of the mobile messaging service WhatsApp on Wednesday, in a $19bn deal that represents the social media company’s biggest acquisition yet.

The deal is a big bet for Facebook, which has until recently struggled to convince investors of its strategy for mobile.

Facebook’s successful bid comes after Google reportedly made a $1bn offer for the company last year.

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

According to data collected from the BuzzFeed Partner network, which tracks visitors to an assortment of major news and entertainment sites with over 350 million combined monthly visitors, Facebook accounts for over 75 million — more than 20%. The number is certainly higher for many newer media organizations, such as BuzzFeed, whose audiences depend on social networks for news.

The rise of Facebook referrals in the BuzzFeed network has corresponded, at least recently, with a fall in Google referrals. One, in other words, is replacing the other. But replacements are never exact: Facebook overtaking MySpace, a superficially similar service, had the effect of pumping millions of eyeballs to outside media organizations; as Facebook's real, identity-bound photos and personal information glued users to the site in a way that MySpace's cluttered data never could, Facebook's News Feed directed them outward in a way that MySpace's blog-centric design never did.

Recent research suggests that the next wave of social networks may not be as generous to outside content providers. Instagram and Vine and Snapchat and WhatsApp and Kik do not replace Facebook and Twitter in terms of functionality, but that doesn't matter — they draw from the same pool of available attention. Facebook stole users' attention from MySpace by being a better MySpace, then it grew into something more — the new wave of apps (and yes, they're mostly apps) is stealing attention away from Facebook by each being something less

now they’re doing multiple things--it’s not like if you’re on Instagram you’re not on Tumblr. You use Whatsapp for this group, and you use Snapchat for these friends. It’s like a complete mess right now.

The thing that is really different has to do with how your life is configured in relationship to technology versus other opportunities. As an adult, you have the ability to go out and hang out with your friends when you want to. Yeah, work may get in the way; yeah, you might not feel like it; yeah, you might be too busy, but you still have a choice over your time and your schedule in a way that young people do not. Their lives are very heavily configured and structured. Their ability to get together in unstructured time with friends is extremely difficult.

To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they've locked down to just a handful of people they care about--which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

To which social media brands do consumers feel the most attachment? Facebook ranked number one in a Brand Dependence Social Media Survey conducted by UTA Brand Studio

And we're not talking about "liking," apparently. To clarify, attachment, which is at the core of Brand Dependence research methodology, refers to the degree to which consumers believe a brand is like themselves and the degree to which thoughts and feelings about a brand come to mind,

Facebook was followed by Instagram, then YouTube, Pinterest and Reddit in the February 2014 survey of 2,006 U.S. adults aged 18 and up.

"We did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens," Facebook CFO David Ebersman said

Facebook may be feeling the burn of alternative social sites like Tumblr and Snapchat that skew towards a younger demographic. But there is a glimmer of hope, Ebersman said: "We remain close to fully penetrated among teens in the U.S."

While the teen embrace of Facebook might be slackening, its Instagram unit has no trouble attracting a younger audience, with teen users rising five percent this year.