Instagram has rolled out version 3.0 of its photo sharing app, which now boasts over 80 million users around the world. The new release focuses on improving the browsing experience for photos, with geotagging being one of the core ideas. There’s a new Photo Maps view that’s similar to what you can find on services like Flickr. The page overlays photos onto a map, allowing you to browse images based on where they were shot.
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If you’ve been shying away from posting your photographs to Facebook because you don’t want them stolen, security software company McAfee has come up with a solution for you. It’s a new tool called McAfee Social Protection, and helps you protect your photos using invite lists, blurring, and lock-down.
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Ever since Google+ was launched in June 2011, users have gushed over the beautiful mosaic view for photos uploaded to the service. Earlier this year Flickr redesigned its photo pages with a similar design, and today Facebook has followed suit. Photo pages on Facebook are being upgraded with larger photos and the same mosaic view that’s becoming so popular around the web. Users can also click specific photos to “highlight” them, or give them a larger piece of real estate on the page. The redesign is just starting to roll out, so you should see it live on your page soon.
If you browse the photos in your iPhone’s camera roll, there’s a good chance there are some in there that you forgot to upload, email, or otherwise share with your friends. Whenever you’re out with a group and photos are being taken, the end of the night always consists of handing out e-mail addresses or promising to upload photos to Facebook, but sadly, more often than not, we forget. Enter Flock, a new “magic” photo sharing app from Bump Technologies. Read more…
Instagram grew to its $1 billion acquisition price through a service that’s used almost entirely through a mobile app. As it continues to balloon in size, it only makes sense that it would expand onto the web to compete against the likes of Flickr and 500px. That day may be closer than you think.
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Flickr users have made quite a commotion in the past couple days begging new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to make the photo sharing site “awesome again”, but how does one go about doing so? Mat Honan of Wired says that one of the site’s big weaknesses is user engagement, and conducted a test to prove his point:
I wanted to test out this notion. So at 3 p.m. on Tuesday I took a photo of a sticky on my desk and uploaded it to several photo-sharing services — Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Path. And just for kicks, I also uploaded it to MlkShk as an afterthought, almost a half hour after all the other platforms. MlkShk is a site with only about 20,000 users, but it’s a very engaged community.
[...] By the next morning Twitter was at 66, Facebook at 51, Instagram at 57, MlkShk at 46, Google+ at 19, and Path stalled out at 2. And Flickr, where it landed on the site’s “Explore” page that highlights the most interesting photos of the day? 23. Perhaps more damning than the poor showing in terms of up votes was how ignored it was in real-time. It was only even viewed a total of five times on Flickr in that first hour.
Online retailer Woot did a similar (unscientific) test earlier this month and also found that Flickr lagged behind the other social networks in terms of how engaged its users are.
Flickr’s Engagement Problem May Be Too Big for Even Marissa Mayer [Wired]
Image credit: Photograph by Mat Honan/Wired
Exactly two years ago today, Instagram testers uploaded the very first image to an app called Codename: a simple photograph of a sandaled foot and a dog. Three months later, Codename launched to the public as Instagram, the $1 billion photo app that boasts 50 million users who have shared 1 billion photographs.
(via Instagram)
Watch out, Flickr — Instagram is coming for you. The popular photo sharing app has quietly updated its website to include commenting and liking on individual photo pages. Previously the website was “read only”, and any interaction with the social network was limited to its mobile interface. The new website, which also features larger images and a slick blue theme, suggests that the company may soon be breathing down Flickr’s neck by expanding beyond mobile. However, it still noticeably lacks profiles and photo discovery features.
(via The Next Web)
There’s an overabundance of ways to share and organize your photos these days. From Flickr and 500px, to Facebook and Shutterfly, you can store and share your photos in many places. But according to Yahoo!, many people still use good ol’ fashioned e-mail. Yahoo!’s senior director of product management Dave McDowell said that over 500-million photos are sent through Yahoo! Mail every day, and so in an attempt to streamline that process and better cater to the needs of their 300-million users, Yahoo! has released a new photo sharing tool made just for Yahoo! Mail. Read more…
After rolling out a similar mobile update a few weeks ago, Facebook is now bringing the “bigger is better” mentality to their standard news feed as well. In case you don’t use Facebook mobile, what this translates into for you is bigger, browser-filling photo previews that should make it that much easier to determine whether or not it’s worth scrolling through all 200 of your friend’s newly uploaded vacation pics. This minor overhaul should start hitting news feeds over the next couple of days.
(via TechCrunch via Engadget)
