1. Has a Chinese language photo app become the first one to achieve global popularity? This app allows you to snap a selfie and then modify as a cartoon character. Its meteoric rise has prompted some skepticism — can an app with instructions only in Chinese be so popular in Australia, US, and Canada, or are the numbers somehow being gamed?
2. Healthcare.gov remained in the news this week, with more fingerpointing and testy hearings. This article argues for the US government’s developing a “digital core” of in-house expertise with more direct control over resources and deliverables.
3. Pew reports that both image creators and curators are on the rise, at 54% and 47% of internet users respectively. 18% of cell phone owners have Instagram, and 9% have Snapchat — the latter speaking to this hunger for just-in-time but oh-God-not-forever content.
4. More on this visual web: Pinterest late last week signed a deal with Getty. Pinterest licenses the images, and Getty hands over the metadata. Seems like a smart win for both, and not the last deal we’ll see where clean, searchable metadata about visual assets is core to the value.
5. Many would kill to have a review from Michiko Kakutani that concludes the author “tells this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.”  If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, leadership, and the internet, run don’t walk to, well, the device in your hand an order it. Amazon is the most innovative and algorithmically-optimized internet company that people rarely talk about, and The Everything Store is about to change that.

Weekend fun: Recovering from the World Series and Halloween, and just a few things left before you get to the weekend? Perhaps you can relate to this mouse’s struggles …

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.