Instagram has released Version 2.0 of its popular mobile photo app, with clear designs on longevity. The company will soon hit the 10-million-user mark, and this new release features some cool new features that will keep Instagram users happy. READ MORE
Facebook recently announced it will now let you adjust the amount and type of activity you see from friends such as photo posts and game and status updates. You can also now follow the public updates of people on Facebook who are not your friends and opt-in to share your public updates with people you don’t know but who might be interested in you. READ MORE
Tech writer Michael Arrington, who founded TechCrunch and sold it to AOL a year ago, announced last week he is raising a $20-million venture capital fund to invest in early-stage technology companies, reported The Los Angeles Times. Since then, he has been widely criticized for what many say is a conflict of interest and now the future of TechCrunch itself appears to be on the line. READ MORE
Yesterday, in a post on Google’s main blog, Google’s SVP and chief legal counsel David Drummond accused Apple and Microsoft of waging an anti-competitive campaign against Android to keep Google from getting access to key patents. READ MORE
About a month ago I posted a story about two tech writers who decided upon opposite ways to deal with e-mail overload. IT World’s Dan Tynan vowed to deal with every message delivered to his inbox for a week, which he said worked pretty well. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler ditched e-mail altogether, pronouncing that if you wanted to reach him you’d have to get to him a different way. Siegler’s month is up and after ignoring the roughly 15,000 messages he received during that time, it’s no wonder he says never has he missed anything less than e-mail. READ MORE
If you haven’t taken your business to Twitter yet, you might want to jump on the bandwagon. After all, even the White House is now using it as a serious medium to communicate with constituents. President Obama sat down Wednesday to publicly answer a bunch of tweets posed to him using the hashtag “#askobama” in an event moderated by Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey. More than 169,000 tweets were posted and the president answered questions about jobs, the budget, taxes, education, and housing. According to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, the event “seemed like the logical evolution of the townhall format. READ MORE
“Email is an absolute nightmare in my life. I dread it in the morning, I dread it more right before I go to bed. It’s always in the back of my mind, lingering,” writes TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. Many of us, also drowning in e-mail every day, can relate to the subtle and incessant pressure created by a constant influx of messages. Siegler’s solution? He’s quitting email, at least for a month. READ MORE
Go to www.wdyl.com and you’ll be visiting Google’s new service called What Do You Love, a simple search box that returns results in one portal window from more than 20 different Google services, including Google Translate, Trends, YouTube, Maps, and Groups. As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out, the best queries are for broad terms like “love,” that will return pictures of love, patents about love, love on Google Trends, videos about love, how to say love in different languages, books about love, etc. A more specific search for say, “Keen girls sandals size 12″ isn’t going to be very useful considering there likely aren’t many blogs, books, or videos on the subject. Search for a celebrity, however, and you can see all sorts of things, such as the fact that in the last 12 months Matthew McConaughey was most popular in the beginning of March. Read more at TechCrunch and Mashable.
With over 100 billion photos uploaded to its site, Facebook has created a new way to make photo sharing more accessible for its users. According to TechCrunch, Facebook has leaked photos of its new photo sharing app for the iPhone, and TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says it’s “killer.” READ MORE
“Dance 10, Looks 3″ might be the best way to sum up Google’s idea for Foursquare implementation with Google Places. It’s a great idea, but when paired with RSS, it’s a dud, says MG Siegler at TechCrunch. And that might be the reason neither company is singing this feature’s praises to the rafters. READ MORE
