Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer found herself in the spotlight earlier this week following a controversial statement made at Flickr’s NYC press event regarding pro photographers:
There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore.
Photographer Zack Arias took offense to the comment, and before long, a number of publications picked up the story, sparking discussion and debate on the matter. Some users even took to Mayer’s Flickr page to voice their opinions. Read more…
By all accounts, a job at one of the major tech or social giants is to be envied. With atmospheres focused on camaraderie and innovation, you would expect that working for Google or Twitter would be pretty fun — and now Twitter has the office cam to prove it.
Put together by Mo Kudeki (an International Engineer at Twitter) as part of one of the company’s quarterly hackweeks, the camera is set up in an oversized bird house at Twitter’s new San Francisco office where it takes pictures of willing visitors and employees. Read more…
In February of 1993, 10-year-olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson kidnapped and murdered two-year-old James Bulger. The two were eventually caught, and became the youngest convicted murderers in modern English history.
Their life sentences were cut short, however, when they were released in 2001 under the protection of new identities and a court order that prohibited the publication of any info that could reveal who they were. Now a full 12 years after their release, UK Attorney General Dominic Grieve is finally getting a chance to enforce that court order. Read more…
In what many are seeing as a bid to take over some of Twitter app Vine‘s newly created video loop market, video company Vimeo has bought up the popular iOS app Echograph. Echograph, in case you’re not familiar with it, is an application that allows you to create animated GIFs, loops and cinemagraphs. Read more…
Twitter and Dropbox aren’t really known as premier destinations for sharing photographs online, but both companies are taking steps toward changing that. Both companies unveiled new features today that are geared toward making photo sharing and viewing through their respective services an easier and more enjoyable experience.
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The tech world has been buzzing over the past couple of days about Vine, Twitter’s new app that lets you share 6-second video loops through an Instagram-style service. If you’ve been out of the loop and need a primer on what the difference between Facebook’s Instagram and Twitter’s Vine is, the above web comic by Willa’s World will bring you up to speed.
Instagram Vs. Vine [Willa's World via Laughing Squid]
P.S. Another big story surrounding Vine today is that the service is dealing with the problem of being flooded with inappropriate content. This comes less than one week after 500px’s mobile app was yanked from the Apple App Store for making nudity available to users.
Today is Data Privacy Day, and all of the major social websites have come out to play. Facebook is launching an “Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer” form, Google explained its approach to government requests for information in a blog post, and Twitter launched an entire website dedicated to transparency in all things data privacy related.
That last one is particularly interesting to us, because that website includes detailed copyright notice stats, putting copyright infringement on Twitter into raw numbers. Oh, and did we mention, copyright notices are by far the most common requests submitted to Twitter — over three-and-a-half times more frequent than government info requests. Read more…
If you got on Twitter yesterday, you probably noticed an abundance of strange, .gif-like video loops. These are the result of ‘Vine,’ Twitter’s stand-alone video clip sharing app that is being called something akin to the “Instagram of Video” by more than a few online sources. Read more…
In one of the first major tests of intellectual property law involving social media services, a judge has ruled that news agencies cannot freely publish photographs posted to Twitter without the photographer’s permission.
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The photograph above shows the location where the following Tweet was posted:
Love hiding in the back at work because I have a 35 year old creeper. #scared #help
It’s one of the photos in a project titled Geolocation: tributes to the Data stream, by photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman. Each image in the series shows the location were a particular geotagged Twitter Tweet was posted.
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