Twitter has announced Tailored Trends will become part of its service, rolling out slowly across the world right now. The idea is to capture "emerging topics people are talking about on Twitter" in a sequence that is now based on where users are located--after all, an emerging trend talking about a tornado warning in the U.S. is irrelevant for folks in the U.K., although users can turn off the location aspect and can, if curious, select locations to see the tailored trends elsewhere. Though it's a subtle adjustment, it's possible it may have a significant effect on the informational value of Twitter as a feed of relevant news for its users and is another step in the future battle for news and sharing against Facebook and Google. Twitter has been making a number of moves recently to promote its usefulness, including a deal with NASCAR and assembling a roster of interested parties in NBA to comment on basketball games through the finals.

DOJ Investigates Cable Companies For Streaming Data Caps
The Department of Justice is launching an anti-trust probe to scrutinize the testy relationship between cable providers and new-fangled streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Online video streaming of the legal and less-than-legal variety are luring television watchers away from expensive cable TV subscriptions. In the U.S. though, it's the same cable providers who wire up a home for access to the Internet that Hulu and Netflix rely on. The DOJ investigation has to do with streaming caps that cable companies like Comcast set on their users, limiting the hours of video they can watch online, while excluding their own streaming apps (like Comcast's Xfinity for the Xbox) from that data count, the Wall Street Journal reports

Court Room Stalemates Spell Trouble For Apple
Apple has been stalled in two key trials in the patent wars it's fighting against competitors Samsung and Google. A Chicago judge cancelled Apple's trial against Motorola mobility last week, and events at a San Jose court yesterday evening snuffed out Apple's efforts to ban Samsung's Galaxy III before its launch on June 21, Reuters reports. These latest events are by no means a final word on the patent issue itself--Apple can continue litigation through appeals and other means. However, the long-term delays collectively benefit Apple's competitors and alleged patent infringers. Meanwhile, Apple is already three years into the patent wars, and the glacial pace of court cases continue to delay and so deny Apple the clear advantage of a decisive win.

Readability Kills Failed Reader Fees Plan To Compensate Publishers
Readability, the web and mobile app that lets users organize and read stripped-down versions of web stories, today announced in a blog post that it will end its controversial reader fees program, designed to compensate publishers on the platform for their content. Starting June 30, Readability will no longer accept reader fees.

The payment program, introduced early last year, collected $5 monthly fees from users (then-known as "premium" members) who, in exchange, would receive access to paid features such as a "Read Later" button. The program continued after Readability switched over from a "premium" to a "subscriber" option that made payments optional. Readability originally intended to distribute the funds it collected to the publishers and other online content providers featured on its platform. The program was CEO Rich Ziade's answer to existing options, such as paywalls and tollbooths, that did little to help publishers monetize content.

However, Ziade writes, "Reading behavior on the Web is incredibly fragmented. Nobody reads from just 15 or 20 sites a month. People read from hundreds of sites a month, creating a vast long tail of publishers." And, according to Ziade, the vast majority of that tail of publishers never registered with the service in order to claim those fees. Ziade says more than 90% of content providers have left their share of reader fees unclaimed, which leaves $150,000 to date that Readability will now begin distributing to registered publishers thorugh the end of July. Publishers who never registered have till mid-July to do so, and Readability says it will donate any remaining funds to literature-minded nonprofits.