social media

In good news for photographers who post their own images, Instagram are planning to tweak its algorithm to "value original content more."

Hundreds of thousands of protesters angry over the verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial swarmed San Francisco streets this weekend in numbers huge enough to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge.

At least that's what happened in the world of social media, where a photo (above) of a pedestrian-filled 1987 celebration of the iconic bridge's 50th anniversary circulated on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and their ilk posing as evidence of mass San Francisco reaction to Zimmerman's acquittal.

In case you thought Instagram was just about faux-antiquing images, au contraire. They're not even a photography company, co-founder Kevin Systrom (shown above) clarified during a recent discussion at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club.

Lytro has been pushing to make their living pictures -- interactive, clickable photos that have a variable focus point -- easier to share. Lytro is a camera that has a very specific, proprietary way of saving and viewing photographs, so sharing these photos can be tricky. Nevertheless, Lytro has been able to quickly expand living photos across the web through social media, most recently to Google+ and Pinterest through Google Chrome extensions.

Many many years ago, in 2005, the rapidly expanding social photo-sharing domain, Flickr was purchased by the larger web empire, …