In Mobile Push, Facebook Buys Parse to Court App Developers Facebook's $85 million acquisition, Tumblr's new mobile ads, Zach Braff's Kickstarter project and more social-media news.

This week's need-to-know social-media news.

With 680 million monthly active mobile users last year, Facebook is taking its mobile strategy up a notch. The social networking giant has acquired Parse, a startup that offers tools to support app developers.

The deal, reportedly worth $85 million, is one way for Facebook to appeal to mobile app developers and create a new source of revenue. Parse offers services that help app developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins and push notifications. Thanks to Parse, Facebook will now be able to sell cloud data storage and other back-end services to developers, while also adding the ability to integrate sharing and buy ads.

What's more, the social network will gain access to Parse's client base -- reportedly around 60,000 developers. "This fills out one of the pillars of Facebook platform that we've been thinking about for a while," Douglas Purdy, Facebook's director of product management, said in an interview with TechCrunch. "Since 2007, the Facebook platform has been about being an identity mechanism with sharing. But over the course of the last six months, we've been thinking about how we can help applications get discovered and how they can be monetized." -- TechCrunch and TechCrunch

Tumblr places ads in its mobile apps.
Starting this week, users of Tumblr's iPhone and Android apps started seeing advertisements on the popular social network. The ads appear in a users' dashboard stream, so they are unavoidable as you scroll through the latest posts from blogs you're following. The mobile ad placement, which comes about a year after Tumblr first began selling ads, is a bid to leverage the network's massive user base and move toward profitability. -- CNET

Salesforce creates social media dashboard for marketers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud computing company Salesforce has launched Social.com, the first tool that allows marketers to monitor the social conversation in real time and serve up ads on trending topics. From the new platform, advertisers can place ads on Facebook and Twitter and create social-media campaigns. Social.com is part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that also includes Radian6's social listening tools and Buddy Media's social publishing and analytics apps. -- SocialTimes

Zach Braff's Kickstarter project gains steam.
Following the runaway success of the Kickstarter campaign to create a Veronica Mars movie, Garden State writer-director and Scrubs star Zach Braff has launched a Kickstarter project of his own. Braff is raising money to finance an independent film that he will direct and star in, and whose script he co-wrote with his brother. In less than 72 hours, the campaign has already raised nearly $1.8 million of its $2 million goal. Braff said he was inspired by the Veronica Mars campaign; such celebrity successes are impressive, but may signal a sea change in the purpose of crowdfunding platforms -- The Independent

Reuters parts ways with deputy social media editor over errant tweets.
News agency Reuters is the latest company to demonstrate the importance of having clear social-media guidelines for employees -- especially ones tweeting on behalf of the company. During the manhunt for the Boston bombing suspects, Reuters' deputy social media editor continued tweeting police scanner traffic even after authorities had asked journalists to stop, and wound up tweeting information that later proved to be false. Even though he'd been tweeting from his personal account, his bio identified him as a Reuters editor, and his bosses were far from pleased. He was dismissed from the company this week. Meanwhile, the editor argues on his personal blog that the instructions and reprimands he received about his actions on Twitter were contradictory. -- Politico