We wince only because Facebook and big companies before it have consistently proven their wonderful ability to run the companies they buy into the ground or shut them down and integrate the technologies into their own platforms.

But should we expect the same this go-’round?

This acquisition is the most notable one in the world of social media since Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, and YouTube is still around much like it was before the acquisition: independent and potentially even better than before, just part of the Google family of products.

We’d hope (and it would seem) that the Facebook-Instagram deal mirrors that of Google-YouTube. According to the post on Zuckerberg’s page, the company understands that it can destroy Instagram if it’s not careful:

“…we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.”

So, to that end, some thoughts on what could become of both sides:

- Instagram isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Facebook is well aware that it has the ability and power to stupidly ruin a good thing, and it doesn’t want to do that. Instagram founder Kevin Systrom reiterates this message, too.

- Facebook users will probably get Instagram filters and better editing features at some point, so prepare to see more pictures of your friend’s kids, only with various filters and blurry parts.

- This could mean the first real domino in Facebook rolling out tags for photos, giving the standardization of tagging huge legs for the future.

- You have to wonder if the Instagram “Heart” will become a Facebook “Thumbs up.”

- Facebook is already the No. 1 photo upload site on the Internet, and this purchase will only strengthen its position there over rivals such as Google+. This could potentially hurt Twitter, too, though Instagram allows for sharing on that site and will continue to do so. Too early to tell.

- It could also mean a death blow to Flickr, which, while popular with photographers, you hear less and less of over time. It’s just not as social and doesn’t have the traffic or mobile friendliness. (And there are other services besides Flickr, as well.)

- It’s likely any real significant development from this won’t be visible for a year or more, but you may see some early tweaks to image sharing on both sides in the first six months.

More than likely, the most notable change to Instagram will be for the founders themselves, who are joining Facebook under terms of the deal: After two years out on their own, they now have bosses.

Feedback’s Dean Browell offers a short study of sorts on U.K. social media site The Wall into we go about crafting our online identities for various audiences. He writes the following on Facebook’s new and slightly freaky Timeline feature:

Facebook’s Timeline changes things a bit. The 7-day grace period Facebook gave users to trim, prune and add to their Timeline speaks volumes to the impact it has on us as a representation of our online identities. For many, it was a complete shock to see Facebook had bothered to keep all of the data they have been posting for years and neatly displayed it as a scrolling scrapbook for them.

The sins of several years ago lined up with the very thing you posted yesterday, the errant ex appearing again for the first time since the breakup. As Facebook accurately described it, it was truly a digital scrapbook of our limited lives as they pertain to Facebook. It combines the realtime and the oldtime. It makes us a sum of our parts. Of course we can shift and delete and highlight to create a carefully crafted identity on Timeline as well, but it made us stop and consider.

Read more of Dean’s high points on how we are perceived on different social networks over at The Wall.

This week Google introduced Pages for its “+” service, allowing brands big and small to join the social networking community and interact with the advertised 40 million people there. Many of those, however, aren’t major users, and are just sitting there, dormant, because they got an invite a few months back when this whole shindig began.

For now, we’ve largely written off Google+ after an initial wave of excitement. To be sure, there are some people there who have kept up with it over the past few months. And they may turn out to be a great social network’s pioneers. But for us, and for most, G+ is just too close to Facebook, which went through its own set of great changes and essentially introduced many of the same features that Google+ considered its own – the stuff that would set it apart.

The features on Google+ today are really no different than the things you can do on Facebook, where 800 million of your friends and enemies are already located.

So, back to Pages. If you know how they work on Facebook, G+’s are largely the same, with a few minor tweaks:

- Businesses and brands can update and share information with their “fans,” which are simply in an organization’s “Circle” on Google+. Pages can’t add people to Google+ Circles, just as Pages can’t add people as friends on Facebook. You can also “Like” a page, but not subscribe to it, by hitting Google’s becoming-more-famous +1 button on the Page.

- You cannot run contests or sweepstakes on a G+ Page. You can link out to them, but you can’t host them on Google.

- When you hit the “+” sign  in the Google search bar followed by the name of a business or group, and that business or group has a Page, you’ll be able to add that Page to your Circles.

Where Google+ may shine with its social products – eventually, and only “maybe, if it succeeds” – is on search. Anything you put on a G+ site – be it your personal profile or your company’s Page – will begin to show up in search rankings. And that could be cool, particularly for those small brands that are trying anything to get their name out.

But still, with very few actually using Google+ and still loyal to the old standbys that we all know and use, that day is likely far off. If ever.

And so, we’ll continue to maybe, someday, actually get around to testing out our G+ page.

-Jeff (@jephkelley)

Active Tweeters
At the Web2.0 Summit Twitter CEO Dick Costolo shared statistics on active users. Twitter now has 100 million month active users, and of those 50% log in everyday. Twitter isn’t catching up to Facebook just yet. Facebook has more than 800 million active users, and of those 50% log in everyday.

iPhone 4$:
With a dual-core AA5 chip, new camera and optics, iCloud and Siri (Apple’s voice recognition app), the iPhone 4S is pretty impressive. Sales for the newest iPhone are pretty impressive as well. Let’s look back a bit: it took 74 days to sell the first million iPhone’s and it took three weeks to sell three million iPhone 4′s.

Drumroll, please.

It only took one weekend to sell 4 million iPhone 4S’, making a new iPhone sales record.

Now, for those of you who don’t have it yet, the question is “To upgrade or not to upgrade?”

Social & Mobile
Highlights from a recent ComScore Study:

Those using social networks from their mobile device grew 37% in the past year and more than half accessed social networks almost every day.

Facebook’s mobile audience is approaching 60 million users. In the past year, mobile posts grew by 50% on Facebook,  75% on Twitter and 69% on LinkedIn.

70% of mobile social networkers posted a status update from their phone and the majority of them read posts from brands from their device.

“Social Jobs”
Facebook and the Department of Labor are working together to connect job-seekers and employers through Facebook. Called Social Jobs,  “The partnership’s goal will be to facilitate employment for America’s jobless through the use of social networks.” Social Jobs aims to provide job postings and resources for job-seekers and recruiters. Like “Social Jobs Partnership” on Facebook to learn more: https://www.facebook.com/socialjobs. (With never-ending privacy issues, I wonder if people will be weary of “Social Jobs” as many don’t want potential employers seeing any part of their Facebook life.)

Are You LinkedIn with your Classmates?
While Facebook was adding features to help users find jobs, LinkedIn was busy adding a feature to help users expand their network. “LinkedIn Classmates” is a new feature that makes it easier to connect with alumni from your college/university. As LinkedIn described,  “In the years since college, your classmates have become experienced professionals, industry experts, potential clients and trusted colleagues – in short, people who can help you expand your horizons.” This new tool allows you to see where alumni work, what they do, and where they live. You can also see what you have in common now, making it easier to network and connect with them.

-Anna (@alucas9)

Facebook has unveiled – in an attempt to curb the growth and keep up with features of Twitter, Google+ and others like it – a feature called “Subscribe,” which will allow Facebook users to, well, subscribe to the news of others. You’ll be able to begin hand-picking the content you want to view on your wall, thus fine-tuning the Facebook experience to your liking instead of having to see the somewhat random mess of updates from an array of people.

Subscribe is completely optional; if you don’t use it, Facebook will continue to run as it always does.

But for those who choose to use Subscribe, the benefits could be many. Like Twitter, instead of “friending” a celebrity or someone you’re really not friends with but are otherwise interested in, Subscribing will let you simply follow their updates (provided the person allows subscribers) without getting all their personal details. Subscribe means that popular or up-and-coming performers, writers, singers or comedians will see their stars shine a bit brighter. Self-proclaimed social media gurus will begin to measure their self-worth on the number of Subscribers they have. And you may find yourself with people you truly don’t know who are interested in what you have to share.

Subscribing may be the answer to keeping people on Facebook while tightening the experience to meet the demands of what people are looking for in today’s social networks: greater control, a more personalized experience, and a reason to stay at Facebook instead of another service: the people.

Facebook, unlike the rash of other services available, already has the critical mass. Yet if you take the pulse of savvy web users and even everyday Facebook users, you’ll hear stories of Facebook fatigue, the desire for more control over content, the need for privacy, or simply that they’ve done everything they can do on the site and are moving on. And while it is still growing, that growth is perhaps slowing (even dropping by 6 million users in May, Inside Facebook reports). It’s no death knell, but it could be telling.

For these reasons, we’re seeing more niche, focused communities pop up on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Path and other platforms. They are more private, and the people on them more difficult to find.

This “privitization” of social networks is a trend we’ve been watching closely. And Facebook is about to board this train in a big way.

Not all of this is new, revolutionary or mind-blowing. But Facebook Subscribe is a bit of a mind-blower when you apply what this is and does to the masses of the social network, the paradigms in play in digital media, and the ever-increasing complexity of the modern identity.

Does it mean everyone will use and understand Subscribing right out of the gate? No, but its very existence is a product of some other trends and thoughts. For months (which is how we count technology time) people have been organizing their lives into separate places: Twitter for public thoughts, Tumblr as an extension of that community or to share personal interests with others, photo-sharing apps like Path or Instagram to share slice-of-life pictures and video.

Up until now, Facebook wasn’t really adequate in separating content as well as simple privacy. But with Subscribing, now even the non-savvy can start stratifying in new ways. People will share more, and less. Lives will take new shapes to certain people. And therefore, so will identities.

The layers of social soil just got more interesting for your garden.

The Numbers Behind Google Plus

Google Plus already hit 10 million users this week and according to readwriteweb should hit 20 million by this weekend. It is also estimated that Google+ grew 350% in only 6 days. Google released a statement staying that 1 billion items are shared everyday on Google+ (in contrast to Facebook’s 4 Billion). New members receive invites, which is how the “social project” has grown so quickly despite still being in Beta.

Spotify Now in U.S.

Popular UK music sharing service Spotify officially launched in the U.S. this week. You must have an invite to access the free version, but if you want to pay for a premium ($4.99) or unlimited ($9.99) version you can listen straightaway. Spotify describes their new venture as “The award-winning music service that’s taken Europe by storm has now come to U.S. shores. Millions of tracks ready to play instantly, on your computer and your phone.” Request an invite here: http://www.spotify.com/us/hello-america

Foursquare does more with Daily Deals

Foursquare is now partnering with companies such as Groupon, Living Social and Gilt Groupe to incorporate daily deals from these sites into their service. Dennis Crowley, CEO at Foursquare, explained that the company would be sharing daily coupons with their users for a cut of the revenue. “We are trying to see if our targeting works and how users will react,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Currently Foursquare does not make any money off merchant-initiated deals. Learn more from the official Foursquare announcement.

-Anna (@alucas9)

Revamping Realtime Search

Google Realtime Search is no longer available (for now). Google’s deal with Twitter to aggregate tweets expired on July 2^nd taking much of the content with it.  Google will be re-launching Realtime search (no set time frame) and this time it will include content from their latest social media endeavor Google+. There will be a variety of sources Realtime search will pull from when it re-launches.

Facebook Announcements

Video Calling

On the heels of the Google+ announcement Facebook held a press conference to announce “something awesome.” As has long been rumored, Facebook announced a partnership with Skype. You can now video chat with your friends (one-on-one) through Facebook.

Chat

Facebook also announced new chat features. Facebook will now organize your “buddy list” based on the people you talk to most. You will also be able to participate in group chats. The really “awesome” thing is that Facebook confirmed they have over 750 million active users and that 4 billion things are shared on Facebook everyday.

Goodbye, Unlimited Data

Those who have the VeriPhone (Verizon iPhone) may want to read this. It has been confirmed that Verizon will no longer be offering unlimited data plans. On July 7th Verizon switched to new usage based price plans. Existing customers will be able to keep their current plans. However, those who switch to Verizon after July 7^th will pay $30 for 2 GBs of data, $50 for 5 GBs of data, and $80 for 10 GBs of data.

Apple App Stats

This week Apple shared their latest app store statistics, stating that “More than 15 billion apps have been downloaded from the revolutionary App Store and more than 425,000 apps are available, including more than 100,000 native iPad apps, to consumers in 90 countries.”

-Anna (@alucas9)

Apple Event Announcements

Apple held a press conference at the WWDC Conference this week and made several major announcements:

• iCloud: The biggest announcement made by Apple this week was iCloud, a service that seamlessly syncs personal content (music, documents, contacts, etc.) across a range of connected devices (computer, iPad, iPhone…).  The best thing about this free service is the simplicity. As Jobs explained, “ICloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices–automatically and wirelessly. And because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it. It just works.”

• iOS5: iOS5, Apple’s advanced mobile operating system, will be available in the fall with new features. In this version Apple built Twitter into the operating system, created a chat for iOS devices called iMessages, and more.

• Lion: Apple announced 250 new features for the next version of Mac OS X Lion, Apple’s advanced desktop operating system. See a full list of features here. Lion will be available in July for around $30.00.

Facebook Recoginition

Facebook always seems to be under scrutiny for privacy issues. Their latest update is no different. And this time European Union privacy investigators are looking into it. The issue is surrounding Facebook’s Facial Recognition feature, which uses software to identify users in photos to make it easier to tag friends. Facebook upset more than a few people when they made this feature default rather than letting users opt in.

“Happening Now”
Facebook is testing a new “Happening Now” feature on the news feed. The feature, which is currently only available for select users, provides real-time updates about friends. The “Happening Now” feed is located to the right-hand side of the news feed. Real-time updates include friend events, recommended Pages, ads, and pokes. As the Mashable article stated, “the resemblance to the Twitter feed is unmistakable.”

Mashable photo documenting Facebook's new "Happening Now" feature

-Anna (@alucas9)

It’s refreshing, then, that one of the latest trends we’re monitoring is that of the closed, private network.

Path, an app for the iPhone (and likely other devices to come), is more of an anti-social network

There’s an interesting thing happening that flows against the constant onslaught of “everything, everywhere,” where content explodes into the public cloud for us all to sift through. We’ve seen it in our own research at Feedback, where industry sub-groups lock doors behind them in private message boards and tiny social caves.

But we’ve also seen more and more built into web apps. One of the most obvious examples in my own life is Path.

Path was first just something we were checking out for Feedback, as we test and jostle and over-use all sorts of new apps on a regular basis. But Path has taken off in an interesting way. The concept is simple: a photo and video-sharing app that doesn’t aim to broadcast your media to the world, but instead focuses on a hand-picked group – an inner-circle of your friends, up to 50 people, that you’d like to share these “Moments” with. Path also carries some neat tricks such as different lenses, location and time-aware plotting. More recently, the “Stacks” feature organizes all of the photos by how you’ve tagged them with People, Places and Things.

I’ve observed two interesting phenomenon in Path: A voice for the introverted, and a personal fanclub.

First I noticed that some of the same people that would never (or rarely) share their every moment on Facebook were more comfortable on Path. Even more telling, they would use Path when they weren’t at home, where they might not signal on other social channels that they weren’t at home. They could do so on Path, because they were only telling the few people that knew they were gone anyway. I found it interesting that these same people never used the full 50 person limit. In fact my own Path barely uses 20 regulars – and I’m fine with that. I found myself revealing more intimate moments on Path. Things I wouldn’t be judged on or things I didn’t have to be concerned with the reaction of the outside world or that errant friend. On Path people would just as soon capture a quiet, fantastic moment of clarity as they would an artistic photo of two dozen Jell-o shots.

Which brings me to the second thing I saw happening: being allowed to see someone’s Path was like being in their fanclub. It is a privileged spot that gives the small audience a behind-the-scenes look at someone’s life. While you might see them remark on Twitter with a general “today was a big day,” on Path you’d get the shot of them getting ready for a job interview. While on Facebook I might post the friend-friendly shot of my daughter Addy on the beach, on Path I would post the less-cheesy but more interesting shot of her spending quality time with her grandfather.

It’s awesome to see my friends take the same – uh, path – in providing a look into the second layer of their life. Path goes beyond the more polished sheen of a person’s social life that is under more scrutiny by a large number of friends, followers and in some cases complete strangers.

Recent articles and conversations I’ve had with analysts muse that the reason many people hadn’t heard about Path was that those who use it don’t make it very public (and for a reason: if I let you know I’m on Path but I don’t want to share with you, that’s a deliberate snub). While it seemed like more of a PR dodge of the popularity question, I actually believe them. There was even a twinge of, “Should I?” before I wrote this blog post because to be frank, I’m not going to let most of the people who read this be in on my Path.

I’d love to see Path succeed and I think it has a long life ahead of it with added features and more depth. That said, if it ends up going away I won’t be shocked, as I fully expect someone to buy it up and mishandle it. That’s the startup way. Sometimes Path gets pitted against other photo-sharing apps like Instagram (a coworker and I frequently have staring contests about that matchup) but it’s really not trying to compete; sure it shares some image-alteration features, but Path’s aim is about handing you ways to create an exclusivity in your social life via the channel — not the placement of your media into a fatter pipe for filtering by others. Path filters at the front, from the perspective of the poster.

But the concept behind Path – the private social network – is certainly not going away. We see it living out on Facebook in private groups and the stricter use of Friends Lists, for example. The inclination to share is being encouraged from all corners, but the “with whom” will become a more important question.

-Dean (@dbrowell)

Happy #EarthDay!

Many online users are taking to Twitter and Facebook to show their support for Earth Day. You can join in the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #EarthDay or keep updated on Facebook by liking The Earth Day Network.

Some Earth Day deals to be aware of:

• Starbucks: Bring a reusable mug to Starbucks for free java or tea
• The Disney Store: Bring in 5 disposable plastic bags for them to recycle and receive a free reusable shopping bag.
• Lowe’s: They will be giving away 1 million trees on April 23rd.
• National Park Service: For Earth Day, The National Park service has made all National parks free from April 16-24^th.

Noisy Tweeter Feature

Twitter is testing a new feature to deal with noisy Twitter users. The feature appears to hide tweets if a user posts several times in a row. As the following image shows, the users most recent tweet will still be displayed and will be followed by a collapsed bar that you can expand if you want to see the other tweets. Learn more at TNW.

Photo from The Next Web

I “Like” Birthdays

Happy Birthday to the Facebook “Like Button.” The like button debuted only one year ago at the f8 conference and has since become one of Facebook’s most popular features.

InsideFacebook highlighted some of the stats behind the button:

• 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook each day
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook (including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites)
• Over half of the 25 fastest growing Comscore U.S. retail sites use Facebook
• Media sites that adopt the Like button average a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook

High-tech Dining

Check out the article E la Carte: Table-Top Computers Bring Restaurants To The Future (With Bonus Trivia!) by TechCrunch. It highlights a new high-tech way to dine. E la Cart, a computer based restaurant system, debuted this week. At the lucky 20 restaurants using these systems, diners are given a portable tablet-like device complete with the restaurant menu, games, and more. Diners order by selecting what they want on the device and their requests are sent right to the kitchen. And when they’re all finished, diners can even even pay with E la Cart. It is certainly an interesting concept to keep an eye on.

Can Not Cloud Compute

On Wednesday, Amazon experienced major connectivity and latency issues with their cloud computing system, which eventually led to a temporary system collapse. As CNN reports,

“The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes — this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon’s storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.”

Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, and Reddit were among those affected. As FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara pointed out, “Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and today’s events make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do.”

-Anna (@alucas9)