Over the last few days, many Instagram and Facebook users received a nasty shock when they were unceremoniously locked out of their accounts. The lock-out was accompanied by a message asking for government-issued proof of ID before being let back in.

If these were famous people or celebrities, that would be understandable. But all manner of users have been locked out of their accounts over the last week pending identification; some are even being asked to provide birth certificates if their IDs are deemed unacceptable. Read more…

Facebook has over 240 billion photos on its servers — that’s billion… with a “b” — and every day about 350 million more are added. Naturally, Facebook needs to store all of those photos somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be accessible at all times because who knows when Jack will need to show Jill some pics of the hill from 3 years ago. Read more…

Instagram’s new terms of service — the ones that caused all kinds of trouble for parent company Facebook before being re-modified — finally go into effect this coming Saturday.

Given that it’s been almost a month since those terms were suggested, Instagram and Facebook may have been hoping that the controversy would have blown over by this time. Unfortunately, the stats seem to show otherwise. Read more…

Facebook summoned a group of tech journalists to its Menlo Park headquarters this morning to unveil the latest products its legions of programmers have been hard at work building. The major announcement was a new search engine called “Graph Search,” which will allow users to run extremely powerful search queries on the social networks database of 1 billion members, 1 trillion social connections, and 240 billion photos.
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There’s a few ways to handle a problem, one of the more popular of which is to eliminate the source entirely. That’s what Facebook has decided to do about the little AppData hiccup last week that cost the company nearly 2% in the stock market. They simply pulled user count data out of Instagram’s Developer API entirely — problem solved. Read more…

All over the Internet today, reports have spread like wildfire that the Instagram Policy Backlash has cost the picture sharing service as many of 25% of their active users. All of these initial reports stemmed from data collected by app metrics firm AppData, an analytics firm that keeps track of daily, weekly and monthly active users for any given app — and the company’s most recent readouts on Instagram showed a decline of nearly 25% in daily active users (from 16 million to 12.5 million).

Seeing the massive metrics drop, AppData immediately told The New York Post that it was “pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement.” As people have taken a closer look at the numbers, however, they’ve begun to realize that something doesn’t quite make sense.
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After Instagram backpedaled and removed some of the more controversial language in their new privacy policy agreement, it seemed the worst was over for the Facebook-owned company. The service has surely taken a hit, but when you have over 100M users, you can probably withstand quite a few. But in the words of Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” and if Instagram user Lucy Funes and San Diego-based law firm Finkelstein & Krinsk have anything to say about it: it ain’t over. Those two parties have launched a class action lawsuit against the popular photo-sharing service.
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Last week we ran a story about temporary photo and video sharing app Snapchat’s recent explosion onto the market and how, sexting jokes aside, venture capitalists the world over are clawing to get a piece of the action. A few days later we found out that Facebook was about to rain all over Snapchat’s parade by using Snapchat’s idea to create its own app.

Today, that second story came true, as Facebook has just introduced the all-new ‘Poke’ app — a photo, text, and video sharing application, complete with the same 10 second maximum time limit made famous by Snapchat.
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Now that filtered smartphone photos have taken over the photo sharing world, many people — especially investors — are wondering: what’s next? One possible answer may be temporary photo sharing.

Just last week we reported that Snapchat had raised $10 million to continue pioneering the frontier. Now, a report has emerged that Facebook is working on its own mobile app that offers exactly the same thing.
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Earlier today, unimaginable tragedy struck the town of Newtown, Connecticut as 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School were gunned down by a man we now know to be 20-year-old Adam Lanza.

As details poured in over the course of the day, Lanza — who took his own life at the scene — was mistakenly identified by police as Ryan, his older brother. Because of this mistake, news organizations nationwide began searching for pictures of a Ryan Lanza matching the description of the gunman, subsequently stumbling upon and disseminating the wrong picture for several hours.
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