This week in social media, Facebook launched a new app as CEO Mark Zuckerberg impressed everyone with his Chinese language skills. Meanwhile, Twitter is planning to kill the password for good, Skype launched its own Snapchat clone, Snapchat launched its first ads, Tumblr embraced video in a big way, and upstart Ello got attention by legally promising to never advertise on its social network.

It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Facebook:

Zuckerberg Impresses China

Billionaire, social media titan, philanthropist, hoodie enthusiast -- 30-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can add "pretty good Mandarin speaker" to his list of accomplishments (no doubt on his Facebook profile), after taking a trip to China Wednesday and showing off his Chinese skills.

Quite a showoff, indeed: Zuckerberg conducted a 30-minute Q&A entirely in Mandarin, delighting the audience of Tsinghua University stuents and impressing everyone else. Learning Chinese was one of Zuckerberg's well-known year long "personal challenges" in 2010, and apparently his comprehension stuck.

According to the Atlantic, Foreign Policy's resident Mandarin-speaker rated his skills as equal to about a second-year college student. Not bad for learning it on his spare time when not conquering the world through Facebook.

Rooms 

Facebook's Creative Labs unleashed yet another Facebook app this week: Rooms. It's a throwback to early 90s Internet, where users would get together on message boards and forums devoted to a specific topic.

Likewise, Rooms can be created for any interest and hobby, and the idea is to allow friends, family and complete strangers to all mingle comfortably in these virtual spaces. As such, in a very un-Facebook move, Rooms allows you to pick a "nickname" for each and any room you're invited to (or create), which means you can chat anonymously.

The app is only for iOS right now. Check it out on the iTunes App Store here. And stay tuned for next week's Tap That App Tuesday right here on Latin Post Tech, in which we review Rooms in depth.

Twitter: Killing the Password

Twitter doesn't like passwords. Neither does anyone else, but Twitter is doing something about it in the form of a (very) new subsidiary called Digits. According to The Verge's exclusive on Twitter's next evolution, Digits will become a brand of its own, branching out to developers outside of Twitter.

But Twitter will likely debut it first. The way Digits works and avoids using passwords is pretty simple: A user logs in using a mobile device and enters their phone number. A one-time-use confirmation code is then sent using SMS, and the user plugs the confirmation code into the app's login screen.

That's it. No email or password required. And according to The Verge, developers like it because it's a more secure way to manage users all around the world, where email isn't necessarily as common as in the U.S.

However, that login process (and a fresh code via text message) is necessary every time you log in to the app, and I can think of some people with limited wireless texting plans that won't like Digits very much.

Tumblr: Betting on Video

Tumblr updated its apps this week with a remade video player to make videos easier to view, post and load on its mobile apps and on the desktop. Like Facebook's videos, Tumblr's mobile app now auto-plays videos on mute, and those videos loop infinitely.

The video player also now supports Instagram and Vine videos, will buffer more quickly and will pop out of a post when clicked, so users can continue scrolling through feeds while watching.

This isn't just a nice update, according to Fortune, it's the beginning of Yahoo's (i.e., Marissa Mayer's) war plan to eventually overtake Google (i.e., YouTube) in being the place for video entrepreneurs to get noticed -- and eventually the place where everyone goes to watch web videos. Good luck with that, Yahoo.

Snapchat Launches Ads, Promises No Sneakiness

Speaking of video, last weekend, Snapchat launched its first ads in the form of a video for the new horror movie "Ouija," running in the Stories section of the app.

And while that ad maybe creeped out some Snapchatting teens, the company's COO Emily White doesn't want the new ad initiative, itself, to creep users out -- which is why White said native advertising won't be an option for Snapchat, according to Business Insider.

Speaking at a conference in New York, White discussed her distain for native advertising, saying, "It's getting really confusing to users. They don't like to be tricked."

White's words echo Snapchat's announcement of its advertising initiative, which frankly told Snapchatters, "We need to make money," but promised it "won't put advertisements in your personal communications -- things like Snaps or Chats."

The official Snapchat announcement said of this, "That would be totally rude."

Skype Joins the Snapchat Cloning Club 

First it was Facebook with poke. Then it was ... Facebook again with Slingshot. Then Facebook-owned Instagram with Bolt. (Zuckerberg must have really felt burned by Snapchat's $3 billion buyout refusal).

Then lots of technology companies started cloning Snapchat, looking for some of that young demographic-attracting ephemeral magic. Now, bringing up the rear, is Microsoft's Skype, which recently introduced a mobile app called Qik.

Qik (the "oh-so-fresh and quirky" misspell-job is pronounced "quick") is focused only on video messaging -- naturally enough for Skype but quite limiting if you just want to send a photo.

If you know Snapchat, you already know exactly how Qik works: You can send short video messages to one or a group of friends, and those video messages disappear after a given amount of time.

It's déjà vu all over again. Interestingly, though, Qik messages only disappear after two weeks, which is long enough to wonder why even bother.

Ello: The New Social Network (Legally) Committed to No Ads

Social media networks launch all the time. Nearly everyone never gets attention and fails.

Upstart Ello avoided the "attention" problem this week when it announced how committed it was to keeping advertising off of its site -- and thus, to never have a reason to collect and hoard data about you: On Thursday, the currently invitation-only startup told The New York Times of its plans to reincorporate the business as a public benefit corporation.

Ello's reincorporation will include a legal commitment in its founding document. The charter will explicitly forbid the company from using ads or selling users data for profit.

"It basically means no investor can force us to take a really good financial deal if it forces us to take advertising," said Paul Budnitz, chief executive and co-founder of Ello, to The New York Times. "It points us in the right direction, and it protects us."

At the same time, Ello announced that it raised $5.5 million in venture capital. According to The New York Times, Ello has gained most of its nearly 1 million users through the summer. Ello's expansion was helped, in part, by a mass migration of users away from Facebook after the company's "real name" policy flap, which angered the LGBT community by not allowing drag queens to use anything but their legal names.