Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Indeed, great things can come from this, and for many of its one billion users, Facebook isn’t just on the web — it is the web. It is where images, biographical data, and every speck of a connection to a person, place, or thing lives, both the dream of a doting family spread miles apart and a marketer close by. It is a place where generations of people now reside, hang out, fawn over public statuses and peek into the lives of others. Ironically, while Facebook’s aim is to make the world more open, they themselves are building a new web within their own closed garden, inaccessible and (mostly) unexportable to all. As the saying states, “what goes on the Internet is written in ink,” so what goes onto Facebook is etched in stone walls.

Yes, much of Facebook’s traffic comes from mobile now, too. For most people who don’t care about all the latest and greatest apps, Facebook works splendidly for them, simply yet powerfully connecting them to exercise the habits they’ve picked up on the web version. Yet, at the same time, mobile platforms (phones and tablets) have presented newer and younger audiences with new graphs of people, folks whose first computing device may have been of the latest iPod touches (complete with Facetime), folks who live in other countries with exploding mobile growth adoption curves. As working professionals have come to use the Internet to help define, cement, and reinforce their perceptions of their own identities, younger generations in search of their own identity can use a battery of new services and mobile apps which containerize their activities, isolating them from the permanence of the web, a permanence embodied by the likes of Facebook and Google+.

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s skeptical comments about the current wave of tech startups (comments that included a not-too-veiled dig at Snapchat), ended up fueling plenty of discussion at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this week. In fact, when I interviewed Sequoia Capital partner Aaref Hilaly backstage, Palihapitiya’s remarks provided a springboard for Hilaly’s take on messaging apps, including Sequoia-backed WhatsApp:

To us, they’re a pretty significant change. We see a company like WhatsApp as reimagining the social network. And the way I think about it is, What’s your real social graph? Is it the people you communicate with and spend time with, or is it the 100 people you barely know on Facebook? We think it’s pretty clearly the first of those, and that’s what mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp capture.

Hilaly went on to praise WhatsApp’s growth (users are supposedly sending 20 billion messages per day) and its design, but he also said there are other companies doing well, especially if you look in other countries. I asked if there’s a bit of a generational divide in terms of usage (which is another way of asking if I’m too old), and Hilaly said “it’s generational and it’s geographic.”

You’ve likely heard whispers of a company called Wander in the past year. They nabbed $1.2 million, launched out of TechStars, and have since gone relatively quiet.

Until today.

Today Wander is launching a mobile app called Days, which aims to change the way you think of photo-sharing on every basic level.

LinkedIn has just reported Q1 earnings of $324.7 million, up 72% year-on-year, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.45, both soundly beating analysts’ estimates (via First Call) of $317 million and EPS of $0.31; as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance from last quarter, when it said it expected between $305 million and $310 million in revenues. Net income for Q1 was $22.6 million a big rise on the $5.0 million in earnings last year. Nevertheless, shares of the work-focused social network, however, are down nearly 11% in after-hours trading on news that next quarter won’t be quite as rosy.

First Call had estimated revenues of Q2 of $359 million, but today LinkedIn issued guidance that it expects sales of between $342 million and $347 million. That’s up between 50% and 52% on the same quarter a year ago, and is a sign of how growth is slowing. This slide from the earnings presentation says everything about the company’s revenue decline:

Today Instagram launches photo tagging, the feature that fueled Facebook’s early growth. New Instagram iOS and Android updates rolling out now let you tag any person or brand in your own photos, which then automatically show up in the “Photos Of You” section of their profile. You get notified when you when you’re tagged, can require approvals before photos hit your profile, and have the option to detag yourself.

[Note that if you're not seeing version 3.5 of Instagram when you go to download the updates, you may have to wait a few minutes for your cluster of the App Store or Google Play to populate with the new version.]

Instagram tells me a year of work went into building the new tagging and Photos Of You section. Until now, people just @mentioned each other in the comments of photos as a hack. However, this didn’t make them much easier to keep track of, you couldn’t say exactly who’s who, and they weren’t hosted together anywhere. The new features are designed to help you more vividly capture moments, build a collection of photos you’re in, and create a curated photo history of yourself on your profile. The Photos Of You section of each person’s profile will remain unpublished until May 16th, giving you time to select whether you want to allow open tagging by any Instagram user, or prefer to pick and choose which appear on you profile.

SocialWire, a startup building Facebook ads for retailers, has raised $1 million in “seed extension” funding. The company is also announcing that Chief Revenue Officer Bob Buch, a former exec at Aol and Digg, is taking on the role of CEO.

When I talked to Buch this morning, he acknowledged that when he tells people that he works in the advertising business, they usually respond, “Oh, I hate advertising.” But that, Buch said, is “why I’m doing this.” The company’s goal to is to create advertising that’s a “win win win” — something that attracts customers for advertisers, makes money for publishers (for now that means Facebook), and actually exposes consumers to relevant products. He compared it to his work at Digg, where the ad formats pushed advertisers to communicate their message in “more newsworthy ways.”

In the case of SocialWire, the company’s working on a technology that it calls Dynamic Product Ads. Instead of just showing people a generic ad for a store (“Shop at Nordstrom’s!”), SocialWire can present them with a specific product that’s targeted at their interests, so the ad is much more likely to be relevant and attention-grabbing.

I’ve found that when people visit San Francisco, it’s not unusual to hear them ask something like: “No seriously, is there a coffee shop on every block in this city?” Yes, San Francisco likes coffee. So do a lot of cities. Busy people thrive on coffee, especially in the tech industry. In fact, some would even say that a substantial amount of coffee is an essential ingredient to success.

Phil Jaber would agree with that statement. After a long love affair with the brew and decades spent testing out his own blends, in 2003, he founded Philz Coffee. What was started out of a corner grocery store has today grown into a budding coffee chain, with 13 stores now open and serving across the Bay Area — one of which you’ll find in Facebook’s headquarters.

With all the coffee flowing through the Bay Area, Philz has stood out by combining varietals to make a bunch of fantastic tasting blends that are made without using a bunch of machinery. These blends were invented by Phil himself, and while they’re not patent-protected, they’re secret family recipes that you won’t find anywhere else, Phil’s son Jacob Jaber and current Philz CEO tells me.

“Happier, healthier, more productive.” That was the goal of mobile app Astrid, and now Yahoo is taking up the mission as it’s just acquired the social productivity platform. Co-founded by a former Palantir engineer, Tim Su, AngelPad-backed Astrid says that it has four million users, who as of September 2012 logged 30 million plans on the platform.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Astrid, we have heard, had raised well over $1 million from investors that included, in addition to AngelPad, Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Jack Herrick and TMT Ventures.

As for the future of the app, “Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions,” the company notes in a blog post announcing the news. “To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.”

Facebook  app install ads were the star of Facebook’s earnings call today. Sheryl Sandberg said 3800 developers used the ads to drive over 25 million installs. 40% of the top 100 iOS and Android app developers bought these ads in the last week of Q1 alone. Mark Zuckerberg meanwhile said, “We’re starting to see real revenue from selling mobile app installs.”

As I detailed yesterday, the app stores are becoming increasingly overloaded as every type of business goes mobile. Developers need a way to get their apps discovered, creating a massive opportunity of for Facebook’s app install ads which launched in October. These lets developers promote their apps in the mobile news feed with a large image, description, and “install now” button that opens the app’s page in appropriate app store. By combining Facebook’s massive mobile user base with its app install ads, Facebook is becoming the paid gateway to app traction.

Zuckerberg noted that with the rise of iOS and Android which it doesn’t own, it wasn’t clear how Facebook would add value to developers. But now Facebook has settled into helping developers build and growth their apps.