SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter, have leased three sprawling floors in a historic downtown San Francisco tower for their low-profile start-up incubator, The Obvious Corporation.

Obvious said Friday it leased 75,000 square feet at the busy 760 Market Street location – known as the Phelan Building – in one of the city’s larger commercial real estate deals in recent months.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An empty oil tanker struck a tower of the San Francisco Bay Bridge on Monday but did not appear to spill any oil into the bay, the U.S. Coast Guard and California state officials said.

The 750-foot-long “Overseas Reymar,” sailing under a Marshall Islands flag, was leaving the bay amid heavy fog on Monday morning when its starboard hull scraped one of the towers supporting the Bay Bridge.

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Associated Press began using its official Twitter account as an advertising platform on Monday, as the news organization seeks new forms of revenue.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd was the first sponsor on the @ap account for breaking news, which is followed by 1.5 million Twitter users. The South Korean electronics maker’s initial “SPONSORED TWEET” promoted its events at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 19 (Reuters) – Twitter’s 200 million
active users can soon savor or cringe over every single
statement they’ve tweeted when the social media company begins
sending users their entire archive of 140-character messages.

Only English-language users have this service for now, but
Twitter will eventually send a download link containing the full
personal archives in one file to any user who asks, the company
said on Wednesday.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 18 (Reuters) – Tubular, a small San
Francisco start-up that provides analytics for YouTube content
creators, has raised $2.5 million in venture capital in the
latest sign of how far the business ecosystem has evolved around
the Google-owned video repository.

YouTube was once known as Wild West of online video, but
over the past two years Google has focused on raising the
quality of YouTube content through a series of direct
investments and the cultivation of third-party “networks”.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Instagram, which spurred suspicions this week that it would sell user photos after revising its terms of service, has sparked renewed debate about how much control over personal data users must give up to live and participate in a world steeped in social media.

In forcefully establishing a new set of usage terms, Instagram, the massively popular photo-sharing service owned by Facebook Inc, has claimed some rights that have been practically unheard of among its prominent social media peers, legal experts and consumer advocates say.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 17 (Reuters) – Nielsen Holdings NV
, the television viewership measurement company, said on
Monday it will partner with Twitter to publish a new set of
ratings that measure chatter on Twitter about TV programming.

The new measurement, dubbed the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating,”
seeks to tap into the stream of viewer commentary and armchair
musings generated on “second screens” – the smartphones and
tablets perched on Twitter users’ laps while they watch, say,
Monday Night Football or the latest episode of “Homeland” on
their TVs.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 13 (Reuters) – When the Israeli army and
Hamas trade virtual blows in cyberspace, or when hacker groups
like Anonymous rise from the digital ether, or when WikiLeaks
dumps a trove of classified documents, some see a lawless
Internet.

But Matthew Prince, chief executive at CloudFlare, a
little-known Internet start-up that serves some of the Web’s
most controversial characters, sees a business opportunity.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Twitter on Monday introduced the ability to add color filters to user-uploaded photos, a step that sharpened its budding rivalry with Facebook Inc.

Twitter’s filters mimic the popular feature that has defined Instagram, the booming photo service acquired by Facebook this year for $715 million.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram removed a key element of its integration with Twitter, signaling a deepening rift between two of the Web’s dominant social media companies.

Instagram Chief Executive Kevin Systrom said Wednesday his company turned off support for Twitter “cards” in order to drive Twitter users to Instagram’s own website. Twitter “cards” are a feature that allows multimedia content like YouTube videos and Instagram photos to be embedded and viewed directly within a Twitter message.