Instagram really wants to avoid the troll infestations that are plaguing other social networks like Twitter -- and, to a lesser degree, parent company Facebook. For that reason, it will soon let everyone disable commenting on individual posts.

From the gas station to the mall to the restaurant, expect holiday shoppers to use their phones throughout their entire "purchase journey" this year. That's according to some new findings from Nielsen, which tracked the mobile usage of shoppers.

Twitter just bought Yes. Why? Well, it may admire the app maker's mission to bring people together around events and such.

A week just isn't complete without some bad news for Twitter. In our latest installment, eMarketer now predicts that, by next year, more marketers will be using Instagram than the troubled tweeting platform.

Need more data to demonstrate the power of mobile? Well, 69% percent of U.S. online adults now use mobile in-store -- mainly to look up prices, product information, promotions, or customer reviews -- according to fresh Forrester findings.

Mobile messaging apps haven't quite taken over the world -- but they're getting there. By 2019, in fact, more than a quarter of the world's population will be using mobile messaging apps, per a new prediction from eMarketer.

The 100 most popular apps keep hogging more and more of consumers' time, according to fresh finding from Opera Mediaworks. In the first quarter of the year, people spent an average of 30 minutes with top apps; 33.5 minutes in the second quarter; and, so far, they are spending an average of 36.9 minutes in the third quarter.

Used intelligently, push notifications are believed to increase retention rates among app users. And, as new research from Localytics suggests, more developers are wising up to that fact.

Worldwide, smartphone profits reached $9.4 billion during the third quarter of the year, according to fresh findings from Strategy Analytics. Remarkably, Apple captured a record 91% share of those profits, or about $8.6 billion.

While desktop ads have historically had higher on-target percentages for reaching their intended audience than mobile, advertisers have made significant strides in closing the gap in recent years.