A little Gnip for your tweets? Twitter purchased Gnip, a social data provider and longtime partner that provides rare access to Twitter's complete data firehose (all tweets ever sent), and APIs from other social networks such as Bitly and Instagram. It serves clients in marketing, finance, and PR. The purchase gives Twitter more control over the monetization of its content—and a broader array of potential ad options to provide to clients (think more data). Apart from Topsy, acquired earlier this year by Apple, two companies remain on the market with access to Twitter's firehose: Datasift and NTT Data. We sense they won't be single for long.

Give our hearts a break! Everyone's aflutter about Heartbleed, an encryption flaw that's affected numerous sites you probably use, exposing your account info—including passwords and credit card numbers—to serious vulnerability. Web security firm CloudFlare—which claimed it's nearly impossible to steal private server keys using the Heartbleed vulnerability—issued a challenge to the wider Web: Test their results by stealing their private server key (the key generates certificates that prove the server you're trying to access is legit.) Surprise! Within hours, two people responded and their hacking results were confirmed by CloudFlare. The first winner said it took just three hours to successfully steal the key. This is a powerful example of harnessing the crowd to optimize your products and test your assumptions... But, going back to Heartbleed, you should really change your passwords. Here's a list of affected sites.

Here's the @CloudFlare team reviewing @indutny's attack. pic.twitter.com/Sv5Iu2H9nK

— Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) April 12, 2014

Talk about awkward. This week in traumatic social buzz, @USAirways made headlines for what may possibly be the biggest social community management gaffe in the history of all gaffes. A Twitter user complained about her late departure (and consequent late arrival) on a flight; the airline apologized, but the user replied with sarcasm. The US Airways response was, umm... inappropriate—totally XXX-rated. (See the full story—and the option to view the tweet—here). The offensive tweet image—apparently the result of an errant snippet of copie/pasted text—was removed an hour later, but not before (not really) speechless Internet dwellers had time to unleash their inner copywriters.

Dear @USAirways, just blame it on Heartbleed. Everyone will believe you.

— Mat Honan (@mat) April 14, 2014

Of course, the airline apologized. Meanwhile, Digiday's published a treatise on whether it's worthwhile for brands to apologize so much on social media, since an apology often draws more attention to the sin. (Hey. We're all for apologizing. It's way worse to develop a reputation as that company that never admits flagrant wrongdoing. Also, it's just... nice. But it's your call.)

We apologize for an inappropriate image recently shared as a link in one of our responses. We've removed the tweet and are investigating.

— US Airways (@USAirways) April 14, 2014

Which late-night host has more social chops? The world's changed, and late night TV with it. The new nightly order includes Jimmy Fallon, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert (who'll replace David Letterman)—all wry wits with sharp commentary and serious social chops, the better for attracting younger viewers. So who's the most viral? The winner's Kimmel, with 54 million views on his most-viewed YouTube vid (below). Fallon lags behind—if we can call it that—with 23 million views. If you're wondering how Kimmel does it, he's known for pranking stars, small children, and even us, then sharing the spoils on the 'Net. Personally, though, we'll always be on Team Coco.

They grow up so fast. We'll wrap with a video that had half the parents we know crying this week. Dutch photographer Frans Hofmeester has a daughter, Lotte, whom he's filmed weekly from birth to age 14. In this tiny montage, see her go from zero to adolescent in the blink of an eye—which is probably the best way to distill the way it happens in real life. At just over seven million views, the video serves as a vivid reminder of how universal some experiences are, and what it means when you bring that dose of humanity into your storytelling.