photo sharing

If there was one thing you could say about Twitter's 2012, it was that it wasn't boring. Over the course of the year, the service became bigger than ever, hosted major events like a Q&A with President Obama and another with Pope Benedict XVI, and became an essential tool for those looking for information about everything from Hurricane Sandy to the civil war in Syria.

But 2012 was also contentious for Twitter. The microblogging service put new restrictions on what it would allow third-party developers to do, and then had to deal with a rebellion by … Read more

A few weeks ago, Facebook introduced the ability to sync photos taken on your iPhones, iPads, and Android phones to your Facebook account automatically. Jason Cipriani describes how to enable the feature in "Getting started with Facebook photo sync on Android, iPhone."

Your smartphone or tablet might prompt you to activate the service, which uploads via Wi-Fi or the cell network the most recent 20 photos taken with the device and all subsequent photos it takes. As Jason explains, the photos are stored in a private folder and aren't posted to your Facebook Timeline until you post … Read more

Flickr released an overhauled iPhone app today, capping a year of effort to reclaim its lost glory with software that it believes will become central rather than peripheral to using the photo-sharing site.

The new app is designed to show off individual photos better, to ease sign-up for new users, to speed photo browsing, and to improve discovery. Better smartphone support was critical, given how much activity has moved to mobile apps.

"Engagement to a high percentage is happening on mobile," said Markus Spiering, head of the Flickr product at Yahoo. "It really brings Flickr into the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said his company's big hurdle is knowing how to mine the constant stream of photos being uploaded each day to the popular network.

"Instagram isn't necessarily a photo company, or a communications company as I like to say, we're also going to be a big data company," he said today at the GigaOm Road Map conference in San Francisco.

Systrom said the company, recently purchased by Facebook, needs to find better ways to organize the billions of photos shared on Instagram. That means looking beyond hashtags for looking … Read more

Color, a mightily hyped mobile application that tried for more than a year to gain a loyal fan base, has finally decided to close its doors, according to a report.

The company yesterday sent an e-mail to employees saying that its board and shareholders last week decided to "wind down the company," Venturebeat is reporting, citing a source. That e-mail, which was not published in its entirety, didn't say when the company will officially shut down its operation, but it did ask employees to immediately cancel "any existing commitments."

Color made a splash last year … Read more

With the debut of Apple's iPhone 5 and its new bigger 4-inch screen, developers had to madly rush to redesign their apps to fit the device. Instagram announced today that its app is now ready for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.

"Instagram version 3.1 is available in the App Store!" the photo sharing app wrote in a tweet. "Updates for iOS 6, iPhone 5, and more. Android 3.1 coming soon."

Version 3.1 shows photos filling the smartphone's full screen and also updates the registration process for new users. The photos … Read more

ACDSee and its publisher, ACD Systems, have been on the scene for several years now, so it's not surprising to see how polished their flagship product is at this point. Getting started with the software is simple, yet the extensive feature set--particularly in regard to management of a large photo catalog--should provide users plenty of opportunities for learning how to master the application. With ACDSee 15, every step of the photo process--importing photos from cameras or other devices; cataloging photos in your library, applying corrections or creative edits to photos; viewing photo slideshows; publishing, printing, and sharing photos--is mostly … Read more

Google has acquired the company behind popular iOS photo-sharing app Snapseed, the companies announced today.

Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, posted the news about acquiring Snapseed creator Nik Software to his Google+ account. The app allows users to edit photos and add filters as well as share them on Facebook, Flickr or via email -- similar to Facebook's recently acquired Instagram app.

"We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone," he wrote, adding that Google+ now has 400,000,000 users since it launched a year ago. … Read more

If you're still wondering why Instagram appealed to Facebook, consider how many of the world's top 100 brands are already on the photo-sharing service.

Some 40 percent of the Interbrand 100 -- the world's most popular brands -- are active on the young service, according to a study released today by Simply Measured. The study of how the brands were used on Instagram was released in conjunction with the debut of a new Instagram analytics tool.

While that's nowhere near Facebook's 98 percent adoption rate or Twitter's 94 percent, Simply Measured points out that … Read more