Instagram Hits 100 Million Active Monthly Users

Instagram is feeling no ill effects following its terms of service nightmare from last year. Instead of seeing a “max exodus,” the company is actually still growing, on Tuesday announcing the app sees 100 million monthly active users—10 million more than last month. TechnoBuffalo added to that tally.

On Instagram’s blog, co-founder Kevin Systrom reminisces about the company’s humble beginnings, and the amazing community that has shaped the app’s success. “It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community,” Systrom said.

It’s quite the accomplishment for a company that still has such a small team, and shows the community is an integral part—you, me, friends, family. Instagram has never been about the filters, but the sharing. And it seems more and more people each month are finding what a joy it is to share their experiences from around the globe.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Google Takeout now liberating Blogger and Google+ Pages

Google Takeout's export functions have slowly extended their reach from profiles and personal contacts to heftier material, such as all our videos. However much we've been using that data portability, Google is eliminating what few gaps are left in its coverage: the company's Data Liberation Front has expanded Takeout to preserve both Blogger content as well as Google+ Pages. Web denizens can cherry-pick just the blogs or Pages they want if a whole-enchilada backup is too much. Regardless of how large a safety net we need, the new options are ready and waiting at the source links.

[Source: Engadget]

Instagram now has a full web feed to compliment its mobile app

Since its launch in 2010, Instagramhas remained an almost entirely mobile-only experience, only recently bringing a profile page component to the web. That changed today with the now Facebook-owned company introducing a full web-based image feed, including commentating and sharing options, for viewing your photos and those of your friends from within any browser.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announced the admittedly major step for his brand via its official blog, stating that it comes as the result of user demand. While the web feed mimics its in-app counterpart very closely -- particularly when viewed in mobile Safari or Chrome for iOS -- it most notably lacks the option to upload photos from within your browser. Systrom remarked that the feature was left out because the core of Instagram remains "about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in realtime."

[Source: TUAW]

Could Google be working on a unified messaging platform?

The screenshot above, while not Android, is extremely interesting regardless because of what it may be showing off. Posted by developer François Beaufort, what's seen here is a Chrome OS desktop with both a new notifications system and more interestingly a new app icon that we've never seen out of Google before. The "rich notifications", which show messages, calls and Google+ activity all in-line and within one pane are displayed in a new Jelly Bean and Google Now design. The new icon, to the right of the Google Drive app in the dock, shows four cascading Google-themed chat boxes.

This screenshot raises a whole lot more questions than it answers, and instantly gets us speculating as to whether or not this new notification system and app are a sign of something bigger than just Chrome OS notifications. Could this finally be a unified messaging service from Google? This could quite easily be just Google+ notifications -- missed hangout calls, Google+ Messenger messages and picture shares -- but we surely hope it's more than that.

Now of course this isn't Android, but it could have a huge impact on Android users if this turns out to be a true unified messaging service from Google. A unified messaging system that brings together Google Voice, Talk, Google+ and others would be a huge step forward for the integration of Google's often-disjointed services.

[Source: AndroidCentral]

BlackBerry: 70,000 Launch Apps, Including Skype, Twitter and Facebook

BlackBerry is listing off apps leading the charge on its new platform, with Skype, Whatsapp, Angry Birds, Twitter, and others all on board. The company said there will be 70,000 launch apps—a pretty impressive launch figure, showing that developers are committed to ushering BlackBerry onto the same plane as iOS and Android as far as selection goes.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Skype update adds portrait calling on tablets, rest of the app locked in landscape

The latest update to Skype improved the UI and added a much asked for feature in portrait calling, but unfortunately the rest of the app is locked in landscape. The portrait calling seemed like a no-brainer fix, especially considering many smaller tablets -- like the Nexus 7 -- have camera setups meant for portrait orientation. The unfortunate bug (or at least we hope it's a bug) is that for now the rest of the UI is locked into landscape orientation. This means that browsing your contacts and initiating calls is all in landscape, then you have to rotate the tablet to hold the call.

Overall the new UI is great and pretty well mirrors the styling of the phone UI, but the perpetual landscape really puts a damper on things. Let's hope Skype pushes out a new update to add back in the portrait support, and in the meantime we can at least enjoy portrait video calls.

[Source: AndroidCentral]

Vine for Twitter, and what it means for you on Android

There's no Vine app for Android just yet, but that doesn't mean you can escape its 6-second video onslaught

Twitter and Vine today announced that (1) Vine is now available for iOS devices and (2) has been purchased by Twitter. If you hadn't heard of Vine before today, we're not too surprised -- it's been in limited beta testing until now, and it's not available for Android. But, seeing as how all roads (eventually) lead to Android these days, we're taking a quick look at it here.

The oversimplified version is that Vine is to video what Instagram is to pictures. In actuality, it's a fairly simple app that lets you take up to 6 seconds of video that might well be mistaken for a really good animated gif. It doesn't have to be 6 consecutive seconds, though. You can do two 3-second clips strung together. Or three 2-second clips. Or, if you hate your friends, six 1-second clips.

You're going to start seeing a lot of these, even if there's no Android app.

[Source: AndroidCentral]

Over Two Billion iMessages Are Sent Every 24 Hours

Here’s another humungo stat Apple dropped during its earnings call on Wednesday: two billion iMessages are sent every single day. So over the course of a year, 730 billion iMessages are sent between iOS users—every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Holy Buffalo.

Apple didn’t quite meet expectations this quarter, but that didn’t stop the company from breaking records. In addition to the impressive iMessage stat, Apple also revealed that it has sold over 500 million iOS devices, with 250 million iCloud activations up to this point. Not too shabby at all.

[Source: TechniBuffalo]

Facebook 'experiment' lets select users pay to have messages routed directly to a stranger's inbox

Get ready to have your preconceived notions of email destroyed. In a Facebook blog post today, the company has gone to great lengths to bury the lede -- which, essentially, says that it's experimenting with the idea of letting non-connected users pay in order to have a message routed to one's inbox instead of that ill-fated "Other" folder. According to the company, it's being dubbed a "small experiment" to "test the usefulness of economic signals to determine relevance." As an excuse, Facebook has evidently consulted with "several commentators and researchers," which "have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful."

Bitterness aside, there is some value in being able to directly ping a stranger you heard speak at an event, or you want to really show your interest in a job opportunity, but it still destroys the level playing field that we've all come to know and respect as it relates to digital communication. This message routing feature is only for personal messages between individuals in the United States, and if there's a silver lining to be found, we're told that the number of messages a person can have routed from their Other folder to their Inbox will be limited to a maximum of one per week. It's unclear how the service will evolve once the testing ends, but perhaps it depends on how much blowback occurs compared to the whole Instagate thing.

[Source: Engadget]

Instagram rolls its ToS back to the previous version after uproar, will 'take time to complete its plans

After upsetting users with changes to its Terms of Service, Instagram announced tonight that it's discarding some of them for now, rolling back the advertising section to the ToS in place since 2010. Reiterating his previous statement that Instagram never had any plans to sell user photos, company co-founder Kevin Systrom explained in a blog post that instead of trying to create terms shaped around "possible advertising products it had not yet developed" it would come back with complete plans and explain to users "how we would like our advertising business to work." There are still changes to the ToS and privacy policy coming effective January 19th, 2013, which can be reviewed on its website.

Also apologizing for a failure to clearly communicate the company's intentions, Systrom noted that any distribution of user photos has been and still is governed by the separate privacy policy. Instagram's changes came as part of its acquisition by Facebook, and the change-policy-face-backlash-then-apologize dance step is a classic Zuckerberg move. So in light of this backtracking, are you going to watermark all your brunch pics before uploading, jump ship to competing services like Flickr or just keep using / not using the service as usual?

[Source: Engadget]

Facebook adds drag-and-drop photos, trials simplified Timeline and delivers new privacy controls

Anyone who's returned from an event with a virtual armful of photos may have been frustrated with Facebook's upload interface, which until now has involved a less-than-intuitive file browser. The company is quietly solving that problem: an update pushing out to individual users lets them drag-and-drop photos into a new post, like we've seen on other social networks, and to a newly streamlined Messages format that's rolling out at the same time. A much smaller circle is seeing a second update. Facebook has confirmed to ABC News that it's conducting limited trials of an updated Timeline that moves the news feed to a single column, replaces the thumbnail navigation with simpler-looking tabs and makes all profile page information available through scrolling. A spokesperson wouldn't say if or when the new Timeline would reach the wider public, but history points to "when" being more likely. They did however mention that the new privacy shortcuts, activity log and untagging tool would be going live for all users starting tonight, and we've already seen them pop up on some of our accounts.

[Source: Engadget]

Pinterest quietly sneaks in support for Twitter Cards

Oh, the mild drama between social networks. Just as Instagram nixed its in-depth URL integration with Twitter about a week ago, now it's Pinterest getting involved -- however, the latter is taking a slightly different route. Thanks to Twitter user Kelly Lieberman, who initially spotted the changes, we have now learned that Pinterest has turned on support for Twitter Cards, allowing folks on the microblogging service to get a slightly better look at links coming from its own, pinboard-style network. Essentially, this means you can now get a preview within Twitter of what your friends are pinning -- you know, things like what type of grub they're craving or pics of insanely cute dogs.

[Source: Engadget]