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In celebration of their 8th anniversary, Twitter has launched a tool that lets you look up the first tweet of any and every account on their service (that isn't protected). We thought we'd put that tool to some photographic use and share what some of the biggest photography names on Twitter were sharing when they first hopped on the now-huge microblogging platform.

We're gonna break it down into three categories: Our favorite publications, our favorite brands, and our favorite photographers.

In a world where viral photo sharing accounts (such as HistoryInPics) are popping up at an insane pace, it's a necessity that there be counterparts that do their best to verify, fact-check, and credit the images these accounts share.

This increasingly necessary job has recently been taken over by a small group of accounts dedicated to doing exactly that: verifying the legitimacy of the images being shared, and making sure the original creator of the images is being properly credited.

Tonight, at 9pm EST, more than 70 nations will broadcast the first episode in the 13-part remake of the show Cosmos. It will be the biggest launch ever for a global TV series.

But before Neil deGrasse Tyson takes over for the iconic Carl Sagan, explaining and enchanting a whole new generation by sharing the wonders of the our universe, NASA wants to get you excited in its own way.

Just like the agency did ahead of the Oscars, the NASA Goddard Photo and Video Flickr account has just uploaded a stunning set of 43 images that will hopefully inspire a bit of awe and get you that much more excited for tonight's premier.

Where do you draw the line between pornography and artistic nudity? Well, if you don't already know you'll have to figure it out fairly soon if you're part of the small percentage of people using Vine to post sexually explicit material.

Last night, thanks to a little star-studded tweeting, Ellen DeGeneres managed to break Twitter with a selfie... a selfie that has gone on to break the previous photo retweet record three times over, proving once and for all that all you need for a good photo these days is a smartphone and some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Pardon me, did I say good? I meant popular.

In need of some spiritual inspiration, photography style? Well you're in luck, because His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama himself has opened an Instagram account and is proving to be a fairly prolific poster.

The popular wedding blog The Wedding Chicks has become the focus of much of the photo community's ire today after an article on the popular photography blog Fstoppers brought attention to one of their business practices. Namely: that they offer "social media packages" in which photographers can pay the blog to have their work featured on the Wedding Chicks Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter.

At first, The Atlantic's profile of the duo behind the mega-popular @HistoryInPics Twitter feed reads like your standard "young geniuses find lucrative economic niche in this crazy new media world" piece.

Purloining somebody else's photos to promote your photography business has become depressingly common lately, but occasionally a new cretin comes forward to push the practice to a new level of sadness.

Just incase @29_JL @hullcityteam your not sure the ball is the yellow thing.... not the £6k camera (photo al walter) pic.twitter.com/op6zGrUBVX— Richard Heathcote (@rheathcote) December 21, 2013

Professional sports photographers know their equipment is always at risk, but British Getty Images shooter Richard Heathcote was still surprised and more than a bit miffed when his DSLR bit the dust at Saturday's Hull-vs.-West Bromwich Premiere League soccer match.

News flash: You can't believe everything you see on Twitter. We know, we were shocked too.

Such was the case with this striking sepia-toned image that started lighting up the mediasphere yesterday billed as "the Earliest Photograph Taken of New York City - Broadway, May 1850." (And immediately started attracting comments in the vein of: "And they haven't fixed the potholes since!")

The tech world is full of 'wars,' all of them over the attention of that flighty creature known as 'the consumer.' And one of the wars being raged most furiously is between the major social networks: the established behemoths Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; that stubborn network loved by photogs, Google+; and the new kid on the block that has everybody's undergarments in a bunch: Snapchat.

Well, Facebook has had its go at stealing some of Snapchat's market (both literally and through acquisition) and has been ultimately unsuccessful on all counts. Now it's Twitter's turn.

Yesterday a young boy named Miles, better known now as Batkid, inspired the world and probably became the most photographed child on Earth, if only for a day. You see 5-year-old Miles has been battling Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia since he was 20 months old, and when the Make-a-Wish foundation asked him what his wish was, he said he wanted to be Batman.

Well, you don't tell a 5-year-old no, and so the Bay Area Make-a-Wish foundation and 12,000 volunteers set to work turning San Francisco into Gotham city, and making sure that everyone who ran across this story today would break down into uncontrollable tears of joy...

Having already racked up more than 3 million followers on Twitter, Pope Francis is ready to spread some photographic love soon with a full-on Instagram presence, according to Vatican sources.

With Google+ constantly working on making things better for photographers -- most recently by incorporating better RAW-to-JPEG conversion -- the other social networks are trying to do their part to entice the photo community as well. For Twitter, that means revamping embedded tweets so that photos are more prominent.

Update: The Associated Press has re-released the photos, and is now confirming that they DO show scenes related to the Navy Yard shooting.

A widely distributed image used to illustrate stories about Monday's horrific shooting at the Washington Navy Yard likely had nothing to do with the tragedy, offering a cautious tale of modern media overreach.

There's a new compact camera on the block, only this one isn't made by Sony or Samsung or Nikon or any of the other brands you might expect to see scrawled across the front of the device. No, this one is made by a little-known Swedish lifestyle company called theQ, and its all-new theQ Camera comes touting the self-assigned title of "world's first social camera."

Today's award for taking copyright seriously goes to Philadelphia photographer/blooger R. Bradley Maule, who's suing the city's district attorney for allegedly misappropriating one of Maule's images as the background for his Twitter page.

Maule specializes in writing and photography about urban architecture, especially that of Philadelphia, as chronicled on his Philly Skyline blog. Maule says in his suit that he discovered this April that one of the images posted on his blog, a 2005 shot of the Philadelphia skyline manipulated to look more or less as it does now, was decorating the Twitter page for District Attorney R. Seth Williams.

Attention photojournalists: As if times weren't tough enough already, a new startup wants to replace your work with Twitter-based crowdsourcing.

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.

You might remember the photo above from last year. For a while, it circulated the web like mad, claiming to show Hurricane Sandy bearing down menacingly on the Statue of Liberty. But if you've read our previous coverage on the photo, you'll know that it is, in fact, a fake -- a composite of a Statue of Liberty picture and a well-known photo by weather photographer Mike Hollingshead.

Photo fakes like this wind up going viral online all the time, often helped along by Twitter where retweet upon retweet puts it in front of thousands of unsuspecting people. Having had enough, a group of researchers from the University of Maryland, IBM Research Labs and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology are trying to do something about it.

One of the hashtags that made its way around the Internet after Instagram video was announced last week was #RIPVine. That, of course, was referencing Twitter's 6-second looping video app that many believed would now be brought low by Instagram's new 15-second capabilities.

Unfortunately for Twitter, recent statistics seem to confirm this belief, even as Vine fights back by adding more features.

Earlier today, we shared the news that SnapChat may be on the way to a $1 billion valuation even as the company moves aggressively towards a monetization scheme. Now, it's Vine's turn to shine, as the 6-second video sharing app proves its worth by blowing past Instagram in total daily Twitter shares.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The tech world has been buzzing over the past couple of days about …

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.

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.

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.

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.

Flickr is the latest photo sharing service to shift its mobile offering to become more like Instagram. Just two days after Twitter launched photo filters for its mobile app, Flickr has updated its official iPhone app with the same feature.

Well that was fast... Just hours after Instagram launched a major update to its popular photo sharing app, Twitter dropped a bomb on the industry by finally unveiling its own long-awaited and recently-leaked retro filters. The move brings it into direct competition with what Instagram offers -- the two services virtually offer the same product now, except Instagram is solely focused on images while Twitter lets you Tweet text as well.

The mobile photo sharing wars are heating up, and two of the big players, Instagram and Twitter, are in the process of trading blows. Back in November, it came to light that Twitter is currently working to build Instagram-style retro filters into its smartphone apps. Instagram retaliated this week by announcing that its photos will soon no longer be embeddable on Twitter. The latest news now is that Twitter is trying to spoil Instagram's holidays by pushing out its new filters by year's end.

Earlier today, Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom took to the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about where his service is headed. He revealed that Instagram is planning to stay independent of Facebook for the foreseeable future and that the service is slowly cutting ties with its rival, Twitter.

Twitter has introduced the ability to share interactive photographs directly through the microblogging social network. Images that have a rich content layer added on via services like Stipple and ThingLink can be displayed in-line through Twitter's website with all their extra goodness intact.

Facebook wasn't content with beating out Twitter in the pursuit of Instagram: the company has now beaten Twitter in launching photo filters in its primary mobile app as well. Just days after The New York Times reported that Twitter will be adding retro filters to its mobile apps in order to compete against Instagram, Facebook has gone ahead and added Instagram-style filters to its official Facebook iOS app.

It's no secret that Twitter was interested in acquiring Instagram before Facebook swooped in and snatched it up. Now, instead of running the popular photo-sharing app, Twitter is waging war against it. Twitter cut off Instagram's API access for the app's "Find Your Friends" feature a few months ago, but that was just the beginning. The next major bombshell announcement is coming soon: photo filters.