Obama 2012 campaign joins Instagram on eve of Iowa caucuses

As Republicans focused on the Iowa caucuses and President Barack Obama made a pitch to Iowans of his own over streaming video on Tuesday, the Obama 2012 reelection campaign took its message to Instagram.

The president's campaign staff, which is also looking to reach voters on Tumblr and Google+ (along with a few Republican rivals), has posted two photos thus far, both of the president speaking with Iowa's caucus voters via video chat, making his case for another term in the White House.

Although Instagram — a photo-sharing app known for retro filters that allows people to share photos with one another from their iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads — is new territory for Obama, the move by his 2012 campaign shouldn't come as a surprise.

In the 2008 election, Obama's team was so well known for its use of Twitter, Facebook and blogging to help build up an overwhelming amount of support that the Technology blog described Obama as "the first social media President." And over the last four years, the White House has made great use of the photo-sharing site Flickr.

Instagram, which has seen its more than 5-million users share more than 150-million photos, said in a company blog post that it is "excited to welcome President Barack Obama to Instagram" and that it looks "forward to seeing how President Obama uses Instagram to give folks a visual sense of what happens in the everyday life of the President of the United States."

The Obama 2012 campaign is also looking for supporters to share their photos with the @BarackObama Instagram account by tagging their photos with "#obama2012," Instagram said.

The company also made sure to point out that political coverage on Instagram has been on the rise over the last year as the 2012 presidential election gets closer.

"News organizations such as NBC News, ABC World News and the Washington Post have been sharing behind-the-scenes photos at debates and town hall meetings across the country, offering a unique look into the 2012 elections," Instagram said.

Among the most interesting photos shared so far by news organizations covering the election on Instagram would have to be Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker's shot of Republican hopeful Mitt Romney typing on his Apple iPad in an airport.

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— Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+

Twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screen shot of President Barack Obama's first Instagram photo. Credit: Obama 2012 / Instagram

MySpace's Tom Anderson weighs in on censored pics on Google+

Call it the tempest in Google+.

Former TechCrunch writer and current blogger/venture capitalist MG Siegler stirred things up this week by complaining that Google's politically correct overlords had censored his profile picture because in it -- not sure how to put this delicately -- he was giving the world the finger.

SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan explained Google's rationale (in a post on Google+): "Why's Google care so much if +MG Siegler wants a middle finger in his Google+ profile picture? Because in turn, that has him giving the finger in Google's search results. And that mess is kind of Google's own doing on how it has linked author pictures so much to Google+ profiles."

Now in a blast from the past, Tom Anderson has taken to Google+ to pounce on the debate. As the co-founder of Myspace, the guy who was everyone's automatic friend on the service, he has a lot to say including this: MySpace became a "cesspool" because people put up all kinds of potentially offensive content.

"All Google+ has done here is execute on its stated plan: removing offensive photos. This is Facebook’s plan, Twitter's plan and Myspace's before it. When you’re processing hundreds of thousands of photos a day (and in Facebook’s case, millions a day), it’s not easy to spot such material (even with algorithms). It’s not that Google+ has decided to do things differently, it’s just that they’re ahead of the game and doing things better," Anderson wrote.

Further, Anderson says users of Google+ (and presumably Google) "don't need to see you flipping us off, nor do we need to see you naked, or displaying something else generally considered offensive. When a social network lets that stuff slide, it turns into a cesspool that no one wants to visit … sorta like Myspace was."

In a Twitter post, Siegler responds: "As much as I enjoy #fingergate I do have this other job I'm attempting to do..."

The real beneficiary may be Google+ itself which, if you believe predictions from the armchair statisticians out there, is starting to get some real traction.

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Photo: Surfboards decorate the main lobby at one of Google's offices in Santa Monica in 2007. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Five ways to get started with your new iPhone

Got an Apple iPhone this Christmas? Well, you're doing pretty well for yourself. It may or may not be Santa Claus' smartphone of choice and you successfully avoided waiting in long lines as many Apple fanatics do once a year when a new iPhone launches.

But marketing and hype aside, the iPhone is one of the best smartphone lines on the market and each of the devices currently available -- the 3GS, the 4 and the 4S -- run iOS 5, the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system. With that in mind, here are five places to get started if you're a first time iPhone owner.

1. Photography apps: Apple's App Store (the only place you can get iPhone apps), with more than 140,000 apps available, is a major bragging right for the iPhone versus its competitors, but not all apps are created equal. However, no other smartphone platform can currently match the iPhone for slick apps that produce fun and artistic photos. The best place to start is likely Instagram, which combines a solid selection of filters to make photos look like they were shot on vintage film cameras and a social network of other users so you can see the world through other lenses. Hipstamatic is another popular choice, which takes the vintage filter approach to another level with the ability to mix and match digital lenses, flashes and film choices to create a more customized look than in Instagram. Another app, called SwankoLab, allows you to alter photos already taken using a simulated dark room.

2. Games: The iPhone is also arguably the best gaming smartphone out there and the choices here are plentiful. Angry Birds is one of the most popular games available on smartphones and is a good place to start. But other choices such as Robo Surf, Cut the Rope, Tiny Wings, Bumpy Road and Kosmo Spin are worth checking out too -- each combining unique art styles, enchanting soundtracks and simple touch screen controls. For those looking for a bit more of a gaming challenge, the third-person shooter Minigore and puzzle game Scribblenauts impress. The sword fighting games Infiniti Blade and Infiniti Blade II show what the iPhone is capable of with detailed 3-D graphics and fast-paced action.

3. Music: Apple's iTunes allows for easy music buying, but there are plenty of other music related apps worth checking out as well. Shazam can listen to and then identify thousands of songs. Band of the Day is a great way to discover new music. Soundtracking is a unique social networking app that allows you to share what you're listening to with others, as well as check out what tunes they like. And if you're a Spotify Premium subscriber, the Spotify app is a must.

4. Built-in Twitter: If you're a big Twitter user, as I am, or even if you're new to Twitter, you're likely going to appreciate that the social network is baked into iOS 5. Checking out a website you care to share in the iPhone's Safari web browser? You can tweet that directly from Safari without having to go and open up a Twitter app. Same goes for photos, videos and locations in the maps app.

5. Ask a friend: As always, talking to a buddy can generate suggestions that may line up with your interests on just about anything -- same goes here. Ask a friend who uses an iPhone what they like about the phone or available apps and you're bound to find something you may enjoy too.

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Photo: A newly purchased iPhone 4S smartphone outside an Apple Store in New York. Credit: Michael Nagle / Getty Images

You can make View-Master-style photo reels with Image3D

Big news, lovers of all things retro: Those 3-D View-Masters from your childhood are back, only this time you can see your own photos when you look through the eyepiece.

Click. There's your dog. Click. There's your kid. Click. There are your party pictures.

This personalized nostalgic experience is brought to you by Image3D, a company founded by Rich Dubnow, the lead photographer for View-Master for 20 years. Image3D has been around since 1997, and it started allowing users to create their own individual images a few months ago. It will begin advertising its new service on the wedding website TheKnot.com and in the Sky Mall catalog next year.

A viewfinder and one reel of seven personalized photos costs $24.95. If you were throwing a wedding and wanted to have a viewfinder on each table loaded with the same pictures of the bride and groom, each additional viewfinder and reel would set you back $8 to $15, depending on how many you order.

You create your own reel by loading digital photos onto the company's website, which also provides the option of adding a funky background or text. The text will appear to be floating in front of the image in 3-D.

Unfortunately, your two-dimensional images will still read as two dimensional through the eyepiece, but we still think this is worth it for that satisfying click.

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Sales of basic digital cameras fall as smartphones fill the niche

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Image credit: Image 3D

Sales of basic digital cameras fall as smartphones fill the niche

Sales of basic digital cameras fall as smartphones fill the niche

Film is already passe for snapshots. Are inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras next to go?

According to a survey by NPD Group, 27% of photos and videos taken this year were shot with smartphones — up from 17% last year.

Not surprisingly, sales of the basic digital point-and-shoot cameras suffered. According to NPD, unit sales of those cameras were down 17% in the first 11 months of this year.

But not all types of single-purpose cameras were losing popularity.

For the upper-level point-and-shoots — with optical zooms of 10x or greater and an average price of $247 — unit sales grew 16%, according to NPD's Retail Tracking Service.

And digital single-lens-reflex cameras — with an average retail price of $863 — were popular enough that some camera shops were out of them the week before Christmas. Unit sales were up 12%, NPD said.

"The smartphone is becoming good enough much of the time," said Liz Cutting, executive director and senior imaging analyst at NPD. "Consumers who use their mobile phones to take pictures and video were more likely to do so instead of their camera when capturing spontaneous moments.

"But for important events, single-purpose cameras and camcorders are still largely the device of choice."

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Photo: A man uses his cellphone to photograph fireworks during celebrations at Saha Kish Square in Benghazi, Libya, in October. Credit: Francois Mori / Associated Press

Facebook fixes security glitch after leak of Mark Zuckerberg photos

Facebook says it has fixed a security glitch after founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's private photographs were published online.

The incident stemmed from a Nov. 27 post on the Bodybuilding.com Web forum. An anonymous tipster spelled out step-by-step instructions to access photos uploaded by Facebook users, even if the photos were marked as private. Among the photos hackers published: Zuckerberg preparing food and handing out candy on Halloween.

Facebook says the security glitch "was live for a limited period of time." It did not say how many of the site's more than 800 million users were affected. "The precise number of people impacted is unknown at the moment but we continue to investigate," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

Facebook blamed the problem on a recent "code push" in which it revised some of its software.

"Not all content was accessible, rather a small number of one's photos. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed," a company spokesman said in an email.

The privacy breach struck at Facebook's Achille's heel. Last week Facebook agreed to settle federal government charges that it exposed too much user information without consent.

Security and privacy concerns have not dampened enthusiasm for Facebook, which has soared in popularity. It's preparing for an initial public offering next year that could peg the company's worth at $100 billion.

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Photo credit: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

Google shuts down Slide, Max Levchin departs

Google has closed down Slide, the social media app and game maker it purchased just about a year ago.

And while many of Slide's 125 employees will be sticking around at Google, joining other product teams, Slide's founder and Chief Executive Max Levchin is leaving the tech giant.

"Max has decided to leave Slide and Google to pursue other opportunities, and we wish him the best," Google said in a statement. "Most of the team from Slide will remain at Google to work on other opportunities."

The decision to shut down Slide, which was founded in 2005, is a sudden one. Google never publicly said how much it bought the company for, but estimates were that it spent $182 million plus $46 million in retention bonuses.

At the time that Google purchase Slide, it was said that the search giant, which had fumbled many attempts at catching on in social media, was really interested in Levchin, who is known as a hard-core senior engineer with big-time social networking credibility.

A person close to the deal told The Times last year that, "There just aren't that many people who have that combination."

Google's social media efforts are on an upswing with the launch of its Google+ social network, which is still in an invite-only beta and has managed to attract more than 20 million visitors.

Slide was allowed to operate largely on its own and often released its products without Google branding and Levchin, Slide's chief executive and a PayPal co-founder, became a vice president of engineering, taking on a lead role in social media efforts at Google.

Just last week Slide opened up its latest effort to the public, a photo sharing app called Photovine that, like many of Slide's products, was first launching on Apple's iOS operating system found on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Slide's decisions to launch apps on iOS before Android, as well as a number of games for Facebook, MySpace and even Friendster, might have been among contributing factors to Google pulling the plug on the San Francisco-based side business.

Another reason for the move to dismantle Slide is likely Larry Page's move to streamline Google's operations and bring focus to what the company is building. Page closed down Google Labs earlier this year despite the incubator being the birthplace of Google Maps, Google News and Google Trends.

Despite the recent launch of Photovine, it and all other Slide products except for one -- Prizes.org developed by Slide's team in China -- are going to be killed off by Google, according to the website Tech Crunch.

Slide said in a blog post on its website that its products will be retired over the coming months and that it will give its users ample time to download any data they want from its services, in case a user wants to move the data elsewhere. For example, on Slide.com, users will soon be able to "either download their photos or export them to a Picasa account." The export feature is currently being built and users will have "several months" to get their data before everything is gone.

"We created products with the goal of providing a fun way for people to connect, communicate and share," Slide said. "Many of these products are no longer as active or haven't caught on as we originally hoped."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Photo: PayPal co-founder, former Slide chief executive and former Google Vice President Max Levchin. Credit: Joi Ito

Photovine, Google's iPhone photo app, now open to all

Photovine, Google's iPhone photo-sharing app, has been available for download for more than a month, but on Wednesday the app was opened up, for actual use, to the public.

Until now, iOS users could download the free app from the Apple's iTunes App Store, but registering for the service and using the app -- well, that took an invite.

In regular Google fashion, invites were a bit tough to come by. But that's a problem that is now gone.

The app was built by the team at Silde Inc., a company Google purchased almost a year ago to build social media apps across platforms. And, as we noted before on the Technology blog, Photovine's app and website are almost completely absent of Google's logo and branding.

Photovine enables users to take a photo from their iOS device (iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch), or from their device's photo gallery, and share it with friends in the app, much in the vein of the popular iOS app Instagram. The major difference here is that photos are shared into pools of other images that are grouped into user-created topics called "vines." The overall experience is intuitive and well-designed.

Once a photo is snapped, or selected from a gallery, users can also share a photo out to Twitter or --Facebook, but strangely enough, not Google+. Hopefully that's something that will be added soon.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Image: Screen shots of the Photovine app. Credit: Google/Apple

Researchers show power of Facebook facial-recognition software

Facebook has come under a lot of heat for its facial-recognition software, in which the social networking site has been automatically enrolling its more than 750 million users.

But Facebook has made it clear that the software, which automatically tags people in photos, isn't going anyway anytime soon. In fact, facial-recognition software is growing and is being used and further developed by Facebook, Google, Apple and the U.S. government.

On Friday Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti showed off his research, funded in part by the U.S. Army, on how facial-recognition technology can be used with Facebook profile photos to match names and other identification data to pictures.

Acquisti presented his findings, alongside fellow researchers Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, at the Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Las Vegas, according to tech website Cnet, which reported on the group's presentation. 

The researchers set up a computer webcam on the Carnegie Mellon campus and asked people to volunteer to have their pictures taken, Cnet said.

Those photos were then cross referenced with a database the team built of about 25,000 Facebook profile photos (all Facebook user names and photos are publicly shared with the world afterall), the report said.

The researchers found that facial recognition software identified 31% of the students by name, Cnet said.

Acquisti then demonstrated an app for Apple's iPhone that can "take a photograph of someone, pipe it through facial-recognition software, and then display on-screen that person's name and vital statistics," the report said.

"Facial visual searches may become as common as today's text-based searches" and that has "ominous risks for privacy," Acquisti said in the Cnet report. 

"What we did on the street with mobile devices today will be accomplished in less intrusive ways tomorrow," he said in the report. "A stranger could know your last tweet just by looking at you."

In yet another demonstration, about 6,000 profile photos and names from a dating site were cross referenced with 277,978 Facebook profile photos and names and "about 1 in 10 of the dating site's members -- nearly all of whom used pseudonyms -- turned out to be identifiable," Cnet said.

In a draft of the researcher's presentation, posted online and titled Faces of Facebook: Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality, they even said they've been able to use profile photos and facial-recognition software to get details such as birthdate and social security number predictions.

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Image: Screenshot of a slide in a draft of the Carnegie Mellon University presentation at the Black Hat Technical Secuity Conference in Las Vegas titled Faces of Facebook: Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality. Credit: Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman /Carnegie Mellon University

Flickr reaches 6 billion photos uploaded

Flickr has reached a major milestone -- 6 billion uploaded photos.

"The beautiful Montbretia flower photo shown here is our 6 billionth photo! It was uploaded Monday by eon60," the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site said in a blog post.

Over the last five years, uploads to Flickr have been increasing at about 20% year-over-year, with users currently uploading more than 2,500 images per minute, said Sheeva Zarechian, a spokeswoman for the site.

With a new billion-photo mark being hit every year for the last five years, it'll be interesting to see if Flickr can keep up the pace.

Facebook is currently the most popular photo-sharing site on the Web, with more than 100 million photos uploaded daily. New challengers such as 500px are emerging as well, not to mention Google continuing to overhaul Picasa with its Google+ project.

Here are some links to other milestone photos on Flickr:

2-billionth photo, November 2007

3-billionth photo, May 2008

4-billionth photo, October 2009

5-billion photo, September 2010

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Image: A screenshot of Flickr's 6-billionth uploaded photo as posted on its blog. Credit: Flickr / eon60