This week, we may have seen the death of the infamously adorable Fail Whale, but many new features on outlets from Twitter to Gmail were born. Without further ado, here’s what we found to be the biggest news, so you may comfortably remain snuggled under a rock.

Twitter Age Gate

How old are you? Oh, Twitter just wants to know. The social network just revamped its “age gate” screening app, giving adult brands the ability to limit user access through an age gate before being allowed to follow accounts for products like liquor or beer or other naughty bits. How modest.

Return on Instagramvestment

The number of brands advertising on Instagram continues to grow by the day. That’s great and all, but what do users have to say about it? Many are responding to Instagram ads with negative comments, and brands are closely monitoring their return on investment. Instagram’s challenge now is to explain the value of likes and follow each ad brings in. Those negative Nancys can be ruthless, but are rather inevitable with such a broad reach.

Pesky Auto-Play

Facebook is currently beta testing a feature that allows videos that are uploaded directly onto the network to auto-play when seen in the newsfeed. This could be huge potential for advertisers considering their audience will have no choice but to watch the video! And to the rest of us, a life of muted default settings.

Lookin’ Good, Gmail

If you’ve been checking your email lately, you may have noticed that Gmail got a facelift. Mashable compiled this article to guide you through the changes.

Voice Search on PCs

Google just got a little more personable with PCs this week by enabling voice search. To take advantage of this, just install the extension, say “OK Google” before your query, and the search engine will hop to it, bringing back some hands-free answers. Welcome to the future, y’all.

Bing Ups Efficiency

Bing introduced “Refined Broad Match Keyword Targeting,” a feature they hope will eliminate the need to change your original search query to a variation for better results. So this means no more searching “Thanksgiving recipes” and “recipes for Thanksgiving,” only to yield totally different results. Hey, it’s the little things.

Keyword Trademark Tip-off

Google Keyword Planner has added a new feature to help you avoid trademark infringement or query term disapproval when setting up campaigns. Now, as you conduct keyword research through this tool, it tells you if a word or phrase you’re considering is already trademarked. It still seems to be in its infancy, but helpful nonetheless!

Fail Whale, Beached

Meet the man who fought the Twitter whale to the death. Twitter’s engineering chief Christopher Fry worked hard to eliminate the “Fail Whale” from the company’s servers. He said to giving the whale the axe: “It had a long history and some of our users feel very connected to it. But in the end, it did represent a time when I don't think we lived up to what the world needed Twitter to be.” RIP, big guy.

Thanks for checking in, and welcome to December!

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