10 Tech Things You Need To Know This Morning

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Steve Mollenkopf

Qualcomm

Steve Mollenkopf

TGIF! Here's some tech news to send you into the weekend.

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  1. Facebook announced messaging feature, Instagram Direct, yesterday. It's a way to send (permanent) video or photo messages to a select number of users on Instagram. Here's how it works.
  2. Twitter changed its "block" feature to merely mute bothersome users and a lot of people freaked out.
  3. So, less than 24 hours after tweaking "block," Twitter reversed its decision. "We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users," Twitter wrote on its blog. "We never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe."
  4. Microsoft is reportedly eying Qualcomm's Steve Mollenkopf as its next CEO.
  5. Traditionally, when you've opted to view images in a marketer's emails, the images were hosted on third-party servers that sent the marketer a lot of information about you. Now Google is blowing that up. It's saving marketing images first then displaying them in emails from Google's cache.
  6. Silicon Valley thinks of Bitcoin differently than you do.
  7. CrunchBase, the popular tech company database owned by AOL, has a new terms of service following a legal debacle with People+.
  8. Even before people could access the Internet on their smart phones, they were rabidly text messaging each other. Messaging has only gained popularity and it has helped startups from WhatsApp to WeChat to Snapchat soar. Here's why startups are winning in the messaging space and how the communication method got away from the tech giants.
  9. Yahoo Mail has been down for days but it should be up and running this afternoon.
  10. Instagram says it has 75 million daily active users. That's about half of its total number of users.