The tectonic plates of social are moving! Get the latest on acquisitions—including Twitter's Madbits buy and Pinterest's Icebergs buy—plus tips on how to hook users in stories, where Instagram is challenging Snapchat, and whether there’s life after the Like. Skim to stay attuned.

French revolutionary assassins, meet... parkour? Topping the viral brand charts is a promotion for the upcoming Assassin's Creed Unity game, which takes YouTubers' love of parkour videos and combines it with 18th century revolutionary costume. (The setting of the game is the French Revolution.) Stunts were performed by Ronnie Shalvis and the French FreeRun family. Considering that it's the only video game ad we've willingly watched in full, we'll say its nearly 7 million views are well-earned.

Skip the ad, kill a puppy. Nail Communications produced a smart YouTube pre-roll ad that uses a common weakness, puppies, to keep people from skipping it (research shows that ads are better remembered when seen in full). Plus, the ad talks directly to you; there's interplay with the "Skip Ad" button; and the puppy thing, however creepy, ties in nicely with Nail's commitment to donate to the ASPCA—"to save some more puppies!"—in exchange for your view. Tubefilter says it gets watched 26% of the time, which is huge for pre-roll.

Sometimes thank you is everything. For Customer Appreciation Day, clients of Canada's TD Bank were invited to use an unusual ATM (Automatic "Thanking" Machine), which asked how they were, expressed interest in and knowledge of their lives, and lavished meaningful gifts. Reactions were filmed and the resulting video has clocked over 4 million views in just a handful of days. If this resonates as content, it's because the attention TD Bank took to really get to know its users, and express sincere gratitude, shines brightly through.

Twitter takes the dive into deep-learning. Twitter's bought deep-learning startup Madbits. Founded by NYU researchers, it's created "visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media." It also understands the content of images, whether or not they've been tagged—which could have huge implications for Twitter's search results. Although the price wasn't revealed, "last year, the cost of a top, world-class deep learning expert was about the same as a top NFL quarterback prospect," Microsoft Research director Peter Lee is quoted as saying.

Speaking of Twitter, the swanky blue bird will likely hit 300 million monthly active users before 2015! Per its Q2 earnings call, it's already at 271 million, and it brought in $312 million in revenue, or a 124% year-over-year increase. Ad revenue alone grew 100% year over year. Wipe that sweat off your brow.

Source: Mediabistro

Those Icebergs melted fast. Pinterest purchased, then shut down, Icebergs. Dubbed "the Pinterest for creatives," it let users create one-stop sites for projects, including articles, files, videos, and images. Co-founders César Isern and Albert Pereta will move from Spain to San Francisco to join Pinterest's product management and product design teams, where their insight on "systems for the discovery and organization of objects will be incredibly relevant as they help build out Pinterest," per a Pinterest spokesman. The acquisition may point to a more collaborative and project-oriented Pinterest. In the meantime, expect Icebergs to vanish after September 1.

Instagram takes on Snapchat... just not in the US. Instagram's launched Bolt, a Snapchat-ish service, in New Zealand, South Africa, and Singapore. Bolt lets you send messages of the text or image variety, but it favors images. Swipe images to "destroy" them anytime you like (unlike Snapchat, where you can view messages only for a few seconds). You can also converse around images you send. Friends must be imported from your telephone contact list, and there's currently no integration with Instagram. If the app catches on, expect an imminent US debut.
 

Giving Gifts the ax. Facebook's had undeniable successes in the last few years (and months), but Gifts isn't one. The feature, which let people send gift cards to one another via services partnered with Facebook, will be shuttered on August 12, likely to make way for the "Buy" button. Per FB's Tara Randall: "We'll be using everything we learned from Gifts to explore new ways to help businesses and developers drive sales on the Web, on mobile, and directly on Facebook." The Gifts team will now work on direct commerce and advertising-related projects in the company.