This week in social media, YouTube had to reset its maximum view counter because you kept watching and sharing PSY's Gangnam Style video. Also, Mark Zuckerberg explained his plan to colonize the world into Facebook using Internet.org, and Twitter introduced new tools to combat cyber bullying.

It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Facebook:

Zuckerberg -- Internet Altruist, "Venture Humanitarian," or Budding Bond Villain?

This week, in one of the most fascinating exposés Time has published in a long while, novelist, critic, tech journalis and excellent Zuckerberg-watcher Lev Grossman went deep and dirty into Mark Zuckerberg's global initiatives to wire(less) the world and eventually expand Facebook's reach to every human on the planet.

As part of this (highly recommended and paywall-free) longread, Grossman also contemplates Zuckerberg's psyche and motivations for expanding Internet access across continents like Africa where the digital world is still developing.

Needless to say, it's complicated.

But one thing is for sure, there's a little over 3.5 billion people in the world who aren't online yet, but through already-existing low-bandwidth mobile signals, that could change very easily and very soon -- if only a huge Silicon Valley company focused on making content offerings more relevant, efficient and accessible to the locals. Even if you don't check out the Time article, you can venture a guess that that's Zuckerberg's already doing.

Still Working on First World Problems

One place where Facebook is already dominant, but seemingly loosing relevance, is in the first world. Especially among teens and young adults: i.e., the Snapchat generation.

So Facebook relaunched its Snapchat clone, Slingshot, after altering its features yet again to more closely mirror Snapchat. After dropping its boneheaded "pre-reply" requirement -- which we saw early on as a shameless user-unfriendly tool to double user engagement statistics on the app -- Slingshot relaunched this week with its equivalent of Snatchat's innovative "Our Story" feature.

Good luck, Slingshot. According to Tech Crunch's early assessment, Slingshot's userbase is so anemic these days that there's not much Facebook could do at this point to turn its latest Snapchat attempt into a success.

Twitter:

New Tools to Filter Out Abuse

Twitter is a dangerous enough place that countries like England have previously instituted heavy and concerning new speech laws to try to control the free-flying digital abuse. But in the U.S., we tend to take the technological and societal approach to tamp down on text-based abuse, rather than legislating speech.

Along those lines, this week Twitter introduced a new blocking and reporting system that's extremely easy to use, quick and mobile-friendly. Check out the embedded tweet and video below for a quick how-to.

Twitter says it will be rolling out these features to all users soon.

Promising No Abuse to Media Companies

While Facebook seems intent on becoming all things to all humanity -- including the single go-to source for the particular news media it decides to promote -- Twitter told media companies at Re/Code's Code/Media: San Francisco event this week not to worry. Twitter at least thinks it's not a direct rival in competition with media companies but instead a tool for them to reach a broader audience.

Re/Code took it as the message "we come in peace." For those of us in media, though, it seems healthy to maintain a certain level of skepticism.

"We're not a media company," said the social media company's VP of global media Katie Jacobs Stanton to Peter Kafka at the event. "We're a communications platform that helps service the media business."

YouTube:

PSY Crashed the Counter

PSY's Gangnam style was such a viral hit thanks to social media and continues to rack up its view count so much that YouTube had to upgrade its counter.

Think of it like a one man Y2K for YouTube (or "PSY2K" as I like to call it).

The previous maximum views counted using the site's counting software, based on a 32-bit integer, was limited to 2,147,483,647. That's over 2 billion. "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater" than that maximum, "but that was before we met PSY," stated YouTube on its Google+ account (via BBC).

Now the 64-bit integer-based video counter has a maximum view count set much (much) higher: 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. In spoken English, this is nine quintillion, two hundred twenty three quadrillion, three hundred seventy two trillion, thirty six billion, eight hundred fifty four million, seven hundred seventy five thousand, eight hundred ... and eight.

Your move, PSY.

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