Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick.

But it seems Hipstamatic isn’t dead quite yet. While the company laid off its engineering team last summer and has tried a few others social apps in the past that didn’t catch on, it plans to announce the debut of Oggl on Wednesday, a standalone app to serve as a social network for your Hipstamatic photos. It will also introduce the ability for users to subscribe to Hipstamatic for exclusive filters.

Even more broadly, it seems Hipstamatic is trying to position itself as the photography app for the true artist, not necessarily for anyone with an iPhone. At the company’s press event in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Lucas Buick quoted famous photographer Ansel Adams, showed the work of photojournalist Damon Winter, and referred to features with words like “filters,” “lenses,” and “new gear,” — the types of phrases you hear from serious photographers.

In other words, this is not the app for your selfies.

“We’re trying to build this little empire for photo nerds,” Buick told me. “We’re not trying to build something to be a new communication tool. It’s really an art tool.”

The traditional Hipstamatic app will stay the same for those who want to keep using it, but Oggl will provide the same photo-taking capabilities while also allowing users to share those photos into a feed — very much like Instagram. And most importantly, users can still share photos to other apps including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare. The app adds a feature I’ve always wished Instagram would adopt, which is basically a photo retweet, or the ability to re-post someone else’s photo that you like. For now, you still have to take your photo in the Hipstamatic app, preventing people from uploading photos they took with a “real” camera and slapping on a filter.

The app will launch in Apple’s App Store this week, and will at first become available on an invite-only basis as it rolls out slowly to users. The app is free to download, with the option to subscribe for 99 cents per month, or $10 per year, for access to special filters and other features.

There’s no question that the addition of a Hipstamatic feed where I can check out my friend’s photos would make me far more likely to use the app. Previously, Hipstamatic wasn’t a destination — it was a camera tool. But that could change; the Hipstamatic filters and photo processing somehow feel more high-quality and expansive than the options on Instagram. Plus, the sharing features that allow me to take photos in Hipstamatic and send them elsewhere is great, especially as social apps are increasingly building silos around content.

There are aspects of Oggl that feel cluttered and confusing. The requirement that you take your photos in Hipstamatic rather than upload them from the camera roll is a real deal-killer. When I’m out on a hike or walking down a busy city street, I want to be able to quickly snap a photo to filter and share on Instagram later. If I have to open an app, there are a lot of photos I’d never take. And the navigation on Oggl between the camera, the multiple filters and lenses, the main feed, and the sharing options isn’t terribly clear.

But using Oggl, I’m reminded of why I initially fell in love with Instagram. As CEO Kevin Systrom has highlighted before, it’s all about the simplicity. Scroll, heart, snap, filter, share. That’s it.

The app’s confusing nature, and Buick’s discussion of Hipstamatic as a “lifestyle brand” in addition to being an app could reflect some of the turmoil and changes the company has faced since Instagram’s rise, which Fast Company examined in a three-part profile of the company’s struggles. Buick said that after Facebook bought Instagram, “everyone thinks they need to buy Hipstamtic,” but that he’s committed to remaining independent of both an external owner or venture funding.

“For us, the biggest challenge is to find ourselves and not forget what we’re doing,” he told me.

So it’s possible that Oggl is too little too late when it comes to social photo apps. But it’s also worth considering that if Instagram starts integrating even further with Facebook over the next few years, and if more sponsored content or advertising starts showing up in Instagram feeds (which isn’t a remote possibility), users could tire of Instagram and start looking for another solution.

And if Hipstamatic sticks around, it could be a good choice.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

This isn’t a new idea, but it was revitalized by Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos in early April, who suggested people pick a teen and find out what kids are up to on Twitter these days. The hashtag took off, and if you haven’t searched for the results recently, you should.

My teen hates school because you have to wear pants there. I love my teen. #followateen—
Choire Sicha (@Choire) April 12, 2013

#followateen update 2: he's upset about being placed into remedial english next semester. He also spelled remedial wrong. Good luck, teen!—
Brandon (@BrandonTCX8) December 30, 2011

Not sure I understand the #followateen hashtag. Are people really following random teens? How do you find one to follow?—
Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 30, 2013

(Sometimes the teens even catch on.)

My teen says she's pretty sure my deer tweet is about her, and she's pretty sure she doesn't know me. #followateen—
Meaghan O'Connell (@meaghano) April 13, 2013

Aside from making fun of random teenagers, the growth of the hashtag can actually teach us a good deal about teens, social media, and our weird relationships with the internet. Here are five things I actually learned from #followateen:

Life is a lot harder for teenagers in 2013

When Timeline came out last year, I went back and deleted a lot of old wall posts, and I was shocked by the volume of bad photos and inane thoughts my friends and I posted. (i.e., “Do you have a copy of the math homework?” or “OMG lacrosse practice was so hard today.”) At the time, I thought that teenagers had probably learned from my generation’s early adoption and over-sharing, and that today’s teens had stopped posting as many inane, personal moments online. Surely they’d come to realize that everything they post on the internet is public and searchable forever.

Hahahaha. No.

Scrolling through posts from teens on Twitter this week, it became clear that they have not stopped posting personal, intimate details of their lives online for anyone to search, and if anything, they’re posting even more. As someone who went through high school missing one of my front teeth (don’t ask), I cringe for the future selves of these teens who will wish they’d posted a little less for the public to see. And in my (pretty recent) day, we didn’t even have Instagram or Tumblr.

PROMMMMM TOMORROWWW CANTTT WAITTTTT 😁😘😍😙—
May29th™ (@TiiAHBHOO) May 03, 2013

I have 6 school days left in my senior year and I just got my first detention ever for leaving gym class early. Ha. #whatajoke—
ʝαє∂єи вαяℓσω (@jaebarlow) May 03, 2013

im grounded, so i guess i will just make some vines—
jason orcutt (@jason_orcutt) May 03, 2013

#followateen is the future

You can lament those selfies and poor grammar on Twitter all you want, but how teens are using social media like Twitter today is likely going to have an impact on what we’ll all be using ten years from now. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are struggling to build advertising networks and continue to add new users, but data has shown that many of those new users are actually coming from older generations, as kids are being drawn to new sites like Snapchat, Vine, Wanelo, Tumblr, and Instagram.

You and I don’t use Twitter the same way

When I log on Twitter, I find people talking about the latest tech news, debating the proper way to report corrections to tweets, and LOLing at internet trends like #followateen. I bet the average age of the people I follow is 30. But searching for teen-esque hashtags and scrolling through the resulting posts was an incredible reminder that Twitter is entirely what you make of it, and that my experience on the network probably looks nothing like yours.

It’s easy to forget when everyone becomes so accustomed to his or her personal feed that this is true. I would guess that there’s far less disparity in people’s different Facebook and Instagram experiences, because those social networks are much more dictated by the design of the sites and the types of content people can post. But on Twitter, you create your own adventure.

Twitter is totally creepy, whether or not you #followateen

Yes, it can be super creepy to #followateen on Twitter and treat that teen like a zoo specimen for observation. But Helena Fitzgerald of The New Inquiry points out that, really, following a teen and reporting back on the hilariousness of their lives is no different than most of our Twitter relationships, where we follow people and retweet them and view their tweets as news; especially when most of them never follow us back. Humans are curious about other people by nature, and Twitter plays up that curiosity in ways that can be creepy but also completely entertaining.

Stupidity on the internet is certainly not confined to kids

Lest the adults get too full of themselves and their superiority over the teens, the emergence of the #followanadult hashtag on Friday serves as incredible reminder that adults can be just as predictable and boring online as the teens are.

Growns who think teen tweets are dumb (#followateen) should see their fellow adults'. Today we dare to #followanadult. Join us won't you?—
Rookie (@RookieMag) May 03, 2013

#followanadult my adult is posting articles about divorce, punctuated by wiz khalifa lyrics.—
m.h. (@zefzefmeredeath) May 03, 2013

my adult gets a text, email and phone call from Walgreens when his prescription is ready. He thinks this may be overkill. #followanadult—
shannon (@shansperl) May 03, 2013

@tavitulle My adult's corporate employer is planning an office-wide Harlem Shake parody. #followanadult—
Kirsten Reach (@KirstenReach) May 03, 2013

my adult is out of kombucha #followanadult—
Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 03, 2013

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

In a blog post, the company described the update, which will be available on Instagram for iOS and Android:

“There will now be a Photos of You section on your profile. When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it. Before your Photos of You section is visible to other people, you’ll have until May 16th to play around and get used to the feature.”

Tagging someone is different than just mentioning them in a comment, so photos you’ve previously been @-mentioned on will not appear on your profile page immediately.

The focus on people and tagging your friends and favorite coffee shop is quintessentially Facebook, a company that’s always talking about people, whether it’s the launch of Facebook Home and a phone organized by “people instead of apps,” or the re-launch of News Feed with the emphasis on large photos of people.

And by being able to tag businesses, like your favorite coffee shop, in addition to your friends, the update points a clear path to Instagram setting up for advertising, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“I’m really proud of how Instagram is going,” Zuckerberg said on the call Wednesday. “Kevin and his team made incredible progress since last april, and the Instagram community is growing even faster than the Facebook community did when it was this size.”

Zuckerberg said advertising on Instagram is “something we’re thinking about,” which wouldn’t be surprising as Instagram moves into its second year under Facebook’s ownership, a deal that was announced in April 2012, but hadn’t produced many changes to Instagram at first. However, tagging people and having a page aggregating photos of you are both very Facebook-like features, and being able to tag brands would set the company up to create brand-specific Instagram accounts and features like Facebook Pages.

For users, it’s important to note that the “Photos of You” will become visible to your followers on May 16, so you can play around with the feature until then and approve photos before they go live to others.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Best practices in optimizing content for social engagement

As an examination of the evolving economics of snapping celebrity photos, Jenna Wortham’s Tuesday New York Times blog post about how a recent candid pic of Beyonce spread across the internet is pretty revelatory. Lurking below the surface, though, I think there’s an even bigger story about how easy it is to snap and publish photos of everyone — not just celebrities — and for those photos to spread further and faster than ever before possible.

Just recently, for example, some relatively harmless (albeit juvenile) “big dongle” jokes put two unwitting conference attendees in the public eye and cost one of them his job. He wasn’t on stage; he was sitting in the 10th row during a talk. The woman who tweeted their images and her complaint ultimately lost her job, too, but her misfortune doesn’t cover his rent.

Even ten years ago, that woman wouldn’t have had a cellphone with a camera and an internet connection and a platform to spread the pic to thousands of Twitter followers — and their followers — in seconds.

I’m not certain privacy laws created at the dawn of the photography era and advanced during the print-media era are well suited to protect our solitude and anonymity in the Instragram era. I actually wrote about this in September 2011, but now seems like a good time to re-raise some of the tough legal questions that phenomena such as self-publishing, social media and viral content raise. Here are some situations where the social web confuses traditional definitions of public and private, and publication versus publicity:

If a celebrity’s friend tweets a photo of that celebrity smoking pot in his own house, is that information protected because it’s newsworthy?

If I’m an individual who simply wants to keep to myself — no Facebook, no Twitter, not even an email address — is writing about me on a personal blog or Facebook page, or uploading (and/or tagging) photos of me, “highly offensive to a reasonable person?”

Even if a disclosure is highly offensive, does publication via social media constitute publicity? What if the publisher only has 3 friends? Or 100? Or 2,000?

Does something going viral change a publication among friends into publicity?

What if a Flickr photo from an intimate dinner with friends, not highly offensive, but potentially embarrassing just because someone is ugly, goes viral and the subject becomes a laughing-stock? What’s the recourse?

You can insert Instagram, Tumblr or Pinterest into those example and the questions remain essentially the same.

And with photos, especially, there’s a lot to consider:

[T]he confluence of facial-recognition technology, cloud computing and big-data processing could soon make it possible to determine a person’s name and any publicly accessible information about them via a mobile app. Nefarious types with some data-science skills could predict your Social Security number knowing just your name, age and hometown. And it all starts with a single photo on Facebook.

For someone who has intentionally kept a low profile online to avoid sharing personal information, the advent of such technologies completely undermines that personal decision. Far from being just a face in the crowd or a guy at the end of the bar, anyone with a mobile phone and $4.99 app could know more personal information than that person would ever share willingly. All because his friends are sharing the details of their own lives online.

A Google Image search for “fat guy speedo.” Public? Yes. Fair to be presented to the entire world with one click? I don’t know.

For us everyday, non-celebrity types, going out in public used to provide anonymity because we were just another face in the crowd. A dinner or party with some friends, even a family reunion, used to be a relatively private affair. Now, we’re just an Instragram post away from being part of the digital record and possibly the subject of public ridicule.

It used to be there was public and then there was public. There was private and there was private. For better or for worse, social media and smartphones are blurring those lines. Maybe we need some boundaries.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Zurijeta.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Within the last year, photo filters and editing have become very important for social networks on mobile, with Twitter attempting to challenge Instagram’s dominance by launching its own filters and editing app, and Yahoo pushing its revamped Flickr app around the same time. People just love sharing photos with their social networks, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event earlier this month, and the competition for photo-hosting has understandably increased.

Google+ said the editing features coming to the iOS app are from the team at Snapseed, which Google acquired back in September 2012. At the time of the acquisition my colleague Erica Ogg wrote why it was a message on Google’s part to Apple, which really liked Snapseed, and why it could ultimately benefit Google:

“So as amusing as it is, Google’s purchase of the company behind Snapseed, an Apple staff favorite, is not just Google trolling Apple. It’s several things. It’s Google understanding the necessity of offering high-quality photo editing within its overall ecosystem; aiming to improve its own current offerings like Picasa; and boosting the fast-growing photography community within Google+.”

Updates to the mobile apps on Monday also include a variety of tweaks and added features like the ability to share your location, improved ability to update communities on the go, and improvements to posts on the Android verison.

It’s not clear that photo editing and filters will necessarily give much of a boost to Google+ (I still don’t see many photos edited with Twitter’s photo filters showing up in my feed just yet), but it’s interesting to see the fruit of a social media acquisition for Google, as well as the future of Google+.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter

However, “flattring” someone has until now remained a slightly clunky business, with the content platform needing to carry a Flattr button and with the user having to remember to click it in order to reward the creator. No longer – changes revealed on Monday make it possible to flattr someone simply by clicking the “like” or “favorite” button that’s already next to their content. At launch, 8 services are supported: Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, Github, Flickr, Vimeo, 500px and App.net.

That’s right: this makes it possible for you to earn money just by being an awesome tweeter.

Cashing in

Let’s remind ourselves of how Flattr works: users budget a certain amount of money that they want to donate or pay each month. Let’s say User X wants to spend $10 a month. Each time User X flattrs someone, that flattr gets added to a tally, and at the end of the month the money gets divided by that number. Flattr itself takes a 10 percent cut, so, if User X flattrs people 100 times in the month, each recipient then gets 9c.

According to Flattr co-founder Linus Olsson, there have been around 1.5 million flattrs performed since the service launched three years ago. Ignoring the fact that some pay a lot and others very little, the average monthly spend per user is around €4.50 ($5.80) and the average flattr is around €0.50. From this, we can deduce that, on average, users flattr around 9 times each month – this is really not much, and it highlights the need for Flattr to make the changes it announced today.

As Olsson explained to me, it was one thing to have a button that blog proprietors could integrate into their own self-hosted site, but it’s quite another thing to handle the content spewed out on platforms such as Twitter:

“The main way of flattring before has been the button, but the problem with the button is with most content sites today it’s impossible to integrate the button. So we have been thinking how to make it simpler to flattr and possible to flattr in places where the button cannot be added.

“The logical way was to use existing like and favorite buttons, which one can argue are empty right now. Now you can make those functions worth something. We see it as giving them the value they should have.”

This integration has not involved partnering up with Twitter and the others; instead, Flattr is simply using their APIs. “That’s one reason we didn’t do this when we started three years ago — it wasn’t possible,” Olsson pointed out.

More widespread, but more subtle

The use of APIs comes with several benefits for Flattr. For a start, it gets the startup around the problem presented to it by Apple last year. Apple rejected a podcasting app called Instacast on the basis that it included Flattr payment functionality – this apparently broke the App Store T&Cs, because it didn’t give Apple a way to claim its 30 percent cut of all in-app payments.

Now, because Flattr’s method of tapping into the core service’s APIs obviates the need for a telltale Flattr button, Apple would have no way of knowing whether the use of an app that’s plugged into Instagram or Twitter, for example, might result in someone making money without Cupertino taking a slice.

The other problem partially solved by the API approach is that of unclaimed flattrs. A Twitter user, for instance, doesn’t have to sign up to Flattr in order to have people flattr their tweets – they do, however, have to create a Flattr account in order to get the cash. So, when they create that Flattr account, authorizing Flattr on their Twitter account will tell the system that, yes, they are the person whom User X meant to credit.

That said, there is an outstanding problem: right now Flattr has no way of automatically informing people that someone out there is trying to give them money; it’s up to the user to tell their intended recipient to sign up and claim their payment (the payment only leaves the user’s account once it is claimed).

Will it work?

As I stated above, there is a lot of goodwill behind the micropayments concept, but also a number of failed attempts to make the concept work in reality.

If you view this as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, then Flattr is very much doing the right thing. After all, you’re less likely to get into being a Flattr user if the person you want to give money to hasn’t made it super-easy to take Flattr payments. Conversely, if there aren’t scores of people using the service, there is little impetus for content platforms to incorporate the Flattr button.

In theory, quietly plugging into platforms such as Twitter and Instagram makes it a heck of a lot easier for the service to gain scale. However, it raises another issue: visibility. If there’s no Flattr button, how is the company going to educate users about the scheme? How will they know that this system is in place, allowing them to reward their favorite content producers?

Olsson reckons the imminent introduction of automated notifications for content creators will help the service spread: “First people get unclaimed flattrs, get a message about them, collect them [then] flattr others.” I’m not so sure. It’s true that the services we’re talking about didn’t sport Flattr buttons in the first place, but I can’t help but feel that some extra marketing element would be needed in order to really educate potential users about the service.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter

It was a good reminder. Back in 2007, the News Feed was a lot boxier. It had a lot fewer photos. There was more text, and everything seemed smaller.

In those early days, Facebook pioneered a different look that distinguished it from competitors like MySpace, offering a cleaner design and fewer options and customization for users. It was a new approach, and it worked. But the amount of content shared to the site has grown by an astounding amount since those days, as you’d expect from a site with now over a billion active users, and the News Feed hadn’t exactly kept pace. It had started to look cluttered and dated, and navigation (not to mention surfacing interesting content) was a challenge.

Mark Zuckerberg takes questions after announcing the updated News Feed in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters on March 7.

So from a visual perspective, Thursday’s update clears out most of the clutter from the homepage, taking Facebook back to its original design proposition of simplicity and filtering. And it emphasizes the idea of Facebook as the “local newspaper,” bringing you a small slice of the most interesting and informative posts on the homepage — and giving you sections where can dive deeper into the material where you want.

I wrote on Wednesday about the three advantages Facebook still has that I didn’t think it should break with the new design: content discovery (showing you interesting things you hadn’t previously discovered), visual media (photos and videos still look the best on Facebook’s page), and the content directory (taking advantage of all your friends and their information on the site.) In many ways, the re-design announced Thursday played perfectly into these three strengths, primarily the first two.

“We believe that the best personalized newspaper should have a wide variety of content,” Zuckerberg explained during the hour-long presentation.

With content discovery, the new News Feed — structured after the metaphorical newspaper — is all about giving you more content to read and discover (in fact, it seems more like a consumption page now than one for sharing — interesting to consider that users are probably sharing more from mobile devices than desktops now). The re-design introduces tabs on the top right of the page that let you toggle your view: “All Friends” (who you haven’t hidden from the newsfeed), “Close Friends” (an older feature where you can designate certain people), “Following” (pages and people you subscribe to), “Groups,” “Photos,” “Games,” “Music,” and “Other.”

In each of these categories, users will be able to select specific set of content to dive into. “All Friends” gives users a chronological series of updates from friends, providing a feature that Facebook employees said was highly requested from users (especially considering the criticism the News Feed algorithms and perceived lack of transparency have faced in the past.)

The “Following” page serves as almost like a page for news, assuming you like any celebrities, journalists, news outlets, or organizations on the site who post updates. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton recently criticized the company for not sharing his posts with subscribers as much as he would expect, and while the company refuted his claims, the Following page certainly addresses this need for asynchronous relationships and sharing.

And the company emphasized music — the music page will show songs your friends are listening to through apps like Spotify that use the company’s Open Graph. Each of these tabs give you a new set of information to dig into and greater control over the information you see.

From a design perspective, the emphasis on photos is a huge part of what’s new. Photos are far more dominant in the main news feed, appearing larger in previews and playing on two obvious influences: the Instagram experience of a continuous photo scroll, and design for mobile that inherently incorporates a simpler, stripped-down look.

While it’s still slightly unclear how advertising will play into the changes, since the company gave virtually no attention to ads on Thursday, it seems obvious, as The Atlantic pointed out, that the larger visuals the company debuted will play perfect with ads when they get the same treatment as user photos. Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call it’s something the company should provide. Mike Isaac for AllThingsD pointed out that for Facebook, it’s all about giving people compelling visuals, and surely that will go for ads as well.

Michael Reckhow, a product manager for mobile newsfeed, said they had worked so hard to build a cleaner mobile feed, that in looking at the desktop, they realized they’d already devised many of the solutions they needed:

“Mobile is inherently simpler,” he said. So it’s fair to say that in some ways, you’ve already seen the new Facebook — on your phone.

For Facebook, the question is how users will respond to the updated look. Hopefully for the company, adoption of the new features will go the opposite way of print newspaper subscriptions.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

How can this be? It’s certainly easy to write it off as the fact that people take photos with their smartphones, not their tablets. But one of the best parts of Instagram, and I know this is the case not just for me, is browsing the images that your friends are posting. (Why else would people get so upset when Instagram removed the ability to view its photos within the body of a tweet?) Just like far more people lurk on Twitter than post, far more people browse Instagram than post images.

And yet Instagram isn’t alone. There are far more popular photo apps of all kinds — camera apps, photo editing apps, photo book apps — for smartphones than tablets. In a study published this week, Suite 48 Analytics found that of the top 25 most downloaded free iOS photo apps, only six were optimized for the iPad. And of paid photo apps, in the top 25 there are just seven made specifically for the iPad; Photoshop Touch and Camera+ for iPad are highest rated. Similar information on Google apps wasn’t available because Google Play does not designate apps by device.

A missed opportunity for developers

When you look at the ownership trends among tablets, and particularly iPads, it starts to become rather puzzling that there aren’t as many photo apps made specifically for the iPad. The Suite 48 Analytics study noted:

• Tablet purchases are growing 75 percent year-over-year right now.
• One in four American adults have a tablet. (Most of those are iPads.)
• The average age of tablet users is 34, compared to the average age of smartphone users, which is 30. In general, older users are more likely to have kids. And as we all know from our Facebook or Instagram feeds, they like pictures of their kids.
• Tablet users are more likely to pay for things than smartphone users: 62 percent of tablet users have bought something on it in the past year, versus 52 percent of smartphone users.

These are important opportunities for third-party developers who are building apps, said Hans Hartman, who published the Suite 48 report. Older users tend to have more disposable income and are willing to pay for these apps — provided they’re good of course. He noted that even though Adobe charges $9.99 for Photoshop Touch for iPad, which is a lot of money for a mobile app, users still praise the price in their reviews because they understand the value of being able to edit their photos by hand on their tablet instead of a laptop or desktop, especially considering what they’d pay for similar software on the desktop.

Adobe Photoshop Touch iPad

And even if developers prefer to offer their app for free, in-app purchases of photo products are a great way to monetize those apps. Tablets are easier for, say, building photo books for a new baby than a smaller smartphone screen, and more convenient than a computer. And, again, the data shows that the same older demographic that has kids and owns tablets is willing to pay for this kind of product.

It doesn’t have to be just about revenue though: a bigger screen often means more freedom for designers. A better layout or interface can allow for features a smaller iPhone or smartphone screen may not. And an app can be easier to use on a larger display. “On iPhone, it’s primarily a portrait way of looking at your phone,” he said. Instead of landscape, which “can make an app better,” Hartman pointed out in a phone interview.

Universal apps — apps that work for both the iPhone and the iPad — can work. But for Instagram in particular there is clearly a lost opportunity here: the downloads of InstaPad, which is not an Instagram product, prove it. People (like me) clearly want an app that sounds like it’s the Instagram for iPad.

So why not give us what we want: the real thing? Now that Instagram has Facebook money to play with, there’s not much of an excuse.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.