1. Are you reading this on your phone right now? Do you find you’re checking your phone compulsively? Then you might just be a mobile addict — defined by mobile analytics firm Flurry as someone who launches apps more than 60 times a day. High risk groups are identified as Teens, College Students (skewing female), and Middle Aged Parents, all of which ensures college campuses are teeming with the Infected.
2. Facebook makes nice with the media by launching FB Newswire, a service that helps users find, share, and embed newsworthy items from its vast trove of user-generated content. A partnership with social media news agency Storyful provides content verification to separate wheat from chaff. No doubt this service will do some useful sifting for overtaxed newsrooms, but ultimately Facebook and its algorithms retain editorial control by deciding what’s newsworthy enough to make the wire.
3. Fun fact from Q1 earnings report: Facebook now has 1.1B mobile monthly active users. Not including its Messenger app. Or Instagram. Or newly-acquired What’s App. For context, those monthly mobile users united would be the third largest country in the world, after China and India.
4. This week Airbnb, the website that lets you make a buck renting out your pull-out couch or luxury vacation home, closed a round of 500M on a 10B valuation. Looks like the collaborative economy is starting to have quantifiable impact at least at the lower end of the hotel market: The Economist reports on research suggesting that if Airbnb’s growth continues at its current clip, budget hotel revenue will be down 10% by 2016.
5. Codeacademy, an interactive platform that teaches people to code, relaunched its website. Here are the 10 design principles that informed their approach. Elevated social proof, commitment to fewer form fields, and enabling focus stand out as drivers of superior user experience.

Weekend fun: Wait — you’ve already seen Brian Williams rapping gin and juice? Well, you should probably watch it again, because it doesn’t get any less funny the tenth time around. Jimmy Fallon’s video editors are a force to be reckoned with.

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