1. Meerkat is a new livestreaming video app that launched and skyrocketed this week. Tightly integrated with Twitter, the app allows you to livestream video direct to your Twitter feed. It’s ephemeral content — viewers cannot replay it, but creators can save the original video to their phones.
2. Despite the mass adoption of Gmail, Google has never gotten contact management right. The user interface is confusing, duplicate records are hard to eliminate, and the termite guy you used once in 2005 seems to be suggested as often as your frequently-emailed sister. Here’s a preview of its much-needed overhaul.
3. How was news represented in Wikipedia in 2014? This long read explores how news entries were produced and consumed, and identifies fascinating patterns. Fun finding: Wikipedia has a cohort of “ambulance chasers” that move between and edit many current events articles.
4. Everything old on the internet is new again, and the animated GIF now appears everywhere from new media listicles to sober New York Times opinion pieces. It’s easy to create a bad GIF, but surprisingly hard to create a good one. Here are useful how-to tips for making great GIFs.
5. If you used the internet last week,you can’t have avoided commentary on #TheDress. Maybe your boss wandered into your office and asked if you can get some of that viral content going. Enjoy this brilliant, albeit reluctant, thinkpiece on why this Buzzfeed achievement is not immediately replicable at your place of work.

Weekend fun: Cultivated Wit hosted a Comedy Hack Day. An online marketplace for unearned privilege took the grand prize, with a runner up app that can silence your judgmental friends by altering low battery life in screenshots. Best accompanied by an a capella version of the PowerPuff Girls theme.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.