Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat. Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked Anthony Ha through the new features in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at the customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types and timing that might lead to a better response.

Yahoo is doing some spring cleaning. The company announced its plans on Friday to shut down several products, including Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, and the Yahoo Mail and Messenger apps used on feature phones. It's all about getting rid of the old to make room for the new, according to Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's executive vice president in charge of platforms, who wrote about the changes in a blog entry.

Now the Facebook can really start to replace your phone. Today Facebook rolled out its free VoIP voice calling feature to US users of Home and its Android Messenger app. That means even less reason to open your standard “phone” app, and more data for Facebook about who you care about the most. Now all iOS and Android users in the US can Facedial their friends.

During its Q3 2013 earnings call yesterday, Microsoft’s outgoing CFO Peter Klein noted that the company plans to bring Windows 8 to smaller devices. Until now, Windows 8 was mostly geared toward desktops and larger tablets, including Microsoft’s own Surface and RT machines. With the forthcoming Windows 8 Blue, rumor had it that Microsoft would enable its OEMs to run Windows 8 on smaller devices, too.

Firefox Mobile OS will launch this summer in five countries, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said at the All Things D conference here Monday. Kocacs, who announced earlier this month that he will be stepping down from his post as CEO, said that the new operating system, which is designed for low-end devices, will launch this summer in Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain.

A Windows 8.1 option to boot to desktop? That seductive rumor has been making the rounds over the weekend. What could be a reflection of wishful thinking, a post at WinBeta (via Neowin), cites a Russian-language Web site as the source. Apparently, there is Windows 8.1 code that disables the Metro Start Screen and sends you "to the desktop automatically."

Up until now, only Apple's Safari browser had blocked third-party cookies by default. Last week's release of Firefox 22 to its developer's channel also came with the feature, indicating that the option will soon make it to all Firefox users. Firefox 22 Aurora blocks third-party cookies by default, putting the ad industry on notice that browsers are about to start looking askance at them. While Safari has had the feature for a long time, no other major browser has supported it until now. Mozilla first announced in February that it was changing its third-party tracking cookie policy.

Adobe has changed the way it sells technology used to enable high-quality streaming services from TV networks and other video providers. With the launch of Adobe Primetime — previously know as Project Primetime — the technology company is providing a suite of tools for video delivery. And it has signed up a couple of big new clients for the suite of products.

Remember that hefty leak from a few weeks back that pointed to a dramatic redesign for Google’s Play Store Android app? Well, in case you were still unconvinced, Google has confirmed that just such a facelift has been in the works, and that the new 4.0 version of the Play Store app will start rolling out to devices running Android 2.2 and newer some time today.

Google released an AdMob SDK for iOS developers today that completes its transition away from allowing apps access to Unique Device Identifiers, weeks before Apple's official deadline for retiring the system. UDIDs are the unique string of numbers that individually identifies each cellular device. Typically, they have been used by developers to track app installations across Apple's user base. Tracking users lets companies tailor advertising to each individual, but it also raises a host of privacy concerns.