That quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With ‘It’ you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man. ‘It’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction. Elinor Glyn (It)

The It girl of web services, Snapchat, is close to snagging about $100 million in new investment at a valuation in excess of half a billion dollars, sources familiar with company’s fund raising efforts tell me.

Snapchat is a mobile service that allows you to send and receive photos or videos that sort-of-maybe disappear afterward. It raised $13.5 million in Series A funding from Instagram-backers Benchmark Capital. The company is based down in Los Angeles and has eschewed the Valley way to chart its own course.

The red-hot company has been fielding funding overtures from a lot of usual suspects in Silicon Valley, but sources tells us that founders have settled on an unnamed non-tradition investors (read: hedge-fund) as the source of this new money. In February 2013, the company was valued at around $70 million and now is being valued around half-a-billion dollars. One source put the post money valuation at around $700 million. The new round of funding includes some sort of a secondary component as well.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel who co-founded the company with Bobby Murphy, both Stanford students, recently said that the company is seeing its users upload 150 million images every day, quite a leap from 20 million a day in October 2012. It is said to have 5 million daily active users, which actually is a pretty impressive as it is the only real measure of the actual popularity of a web service.

So why such a rich valuation? One argument — or at least the one I can make — is that as we shift to mobile there are opportunities to recreate and reinvent the social experience. Facebook is decidedly web and despite its mobile efforts, doesn’t have the purity of an experience built for mobile. Instagram was built for mobile and it created a unique culture around the service (that ultimately was worth $715 million to Facebook.) We are seeing something similar with Snapchat — which is part of what I call the “Alive Web.”

Of course, the challenge with all these services is how to take actual usage (aka engagement) and turn into dollars without impacting the community and the core service. We have seen the challenges of monetization in a mini-backlash over on post-Yahoo acquisition Tumblr. Facebook, in its attempts to grow revenue, has polluted the experience with too many ads and its division. Instagram is still searching for possible revenue streams.

But for now, Snapchat is having its moment and that means getting the cash into its coffers.

Here are some of our posts that outline and provide context as to why we find Snapchat a company and a story worth writing about:

• Realtime & the off switch.
• Snapchat and our never ending quest for impermanance. [Mathew Ingram]
• Snapchat rises: why Poke’s decline shows Facebook’s inability to invent.
• How Snapchat made a leap of faith by building atop Google’s cloud services [Stacey Higginbotham]
• Say hello to the alive web.

I was reminded of that feeling this morning when I ended up having coffee with Ravi Vora and Lauryn Meyers, twenty-something creatives from Los Angeles. These two travel around the country, combining their work and love of photography and sharing it with thousands via Instagram. I am one of those thousands who have been spell-bound by the ethereal beauty of their Instagrams.

Vora told me that he grew up in Michigan wanting to be a geneticist but when he scratched his creative itch, he ended up at a digital ad agency, doing creative things, including taking photos for Nike and making films. Meyers told me about her life as an army brat and her Los Angeles plans that involve wardrobe design. I had never met them till this morning, but I felt like I knew them already anyway — that I’d traveled with them over the holidays and had shared the antics of their cat. In fact, we talked as if we had known each other for a long time.

Some Instagram friends with whom I went out for a photo walk.

Square-shaped dream weavers

And this isn’t the first time I met someone on Instagram and then started spending time with them in the real world, already somewhat aware of snippets of their life. I have gone on photo walks with Instagram friends. I have attended “Instameets.” Vora decided that Instagram’s communal aspect was so strong that he ended up making a short film, the Instagram Generation, exploring this phenomenon. He wrote on his blog:

Through this tiny picture-sharing app, people have met up, become friends, started dating, flown across the world to meet each other, and gone on adventures they would have never imagined they’d add to their bucket list. Not to mention the inspiration they’ve found through following new people. From photography techniques, to jumps, to locations around the globe, there are no bounds to the creative ideas and unique ways that we share them. Well, besides that little square.

That video actually sums up Instagram perfectly. Instagram is one of those rare social phenomenons that marries the online and the offline and in the process, creates a unique community. It perhaps is one of those rare services that has not lost is charm over time. Twitter is a must in my line of work — it runs in the background much like news radio and CNBC. Facebook, on the other hand, has turned into a chore, mostly because of the expectations and information creep.

Delighted

Instagram, however, is just pure, unadulterated delight. It still sits on the first screen of my iPhone, much like Twitter.  It is a chance to get lost in the moments and beauty of someone else. Instagram, which recently sped past the 100 million monthly active users milestone, is reality television, where thousands of realities (and un-realities) are folding across the world. [Of course, the kids use it differently.]

While Facebook has bigger numbers, it also lacks the warmth and the loving feeling of a truly social experience. The last time we experienced such a powerful community, it was on Flickr, the online photo-service that is now owned by Yahoo and has suffered from apathy under various Yahoo regimes. In the New York Times, David Pogue reviewed Flickr and focused on the vast storage space that comes with the new and improved (questionable) service.”Flickr. Good writing, wrong focus” is how I would put it. Mike Monteiro, a rabble rouser extraordinare and a design guru, put it best when he tweeted:

David @Pogue’s take on the new @Flickr makes sense if you think of Flickr as a place photographers store photos, rather than a community.—
Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) June 02, 2013

Even though it is has new overlords, Instagram still has that loving feeling a year after it was acquired. It has nothing to do with the founders, though they are important to keeping the spirit alive. Flickr survived on the power of its community long after the founders left. Instagram, too, is going to keep growing, as long as Facebook doesn’t start meddling with the formula too much.

Any day now, we can expect the demands of Wall Street to persuade Facebook to start making money off Instagram. But for now, it seems those square photos have the power to be dreamweavers.

Also, another fine documentary on Instagram from director Paul Tellefsen. It is brilliant, to say the least.

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

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Which is why Eye-Fi, has always been an interesting little company. Its first product, launched in 2006, was designed to get photos off a camera and onto your PC without worrying about wires and synching. It also worked with some digital picture frames as well. But since most of us don’t want to ship snaps from our dedicated cameras to a PC and then to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, Eye-Fi needed something to keep up with our mobile addictions.

That apparently is the Mobi card, which costs $50 for an 8 GB option and $80 for a 16GB option. Users can ship photos direct to the their smartphones or tablets for editing and sharing, instead of waiting to transfer them later. The card provides its own Wi-Fi, so users just replace any camera’s standard SD card with Mobi, download the Eye-Fi app on their iOS or Android device, and start transferring.

The product speaks to several shifts that have occurred in the seven years Eye-Fi has been around. First, picture sharing has become part of the everyday, instant conversations people have, while the editing and sharing tools on a smartphone have become powerful enough for people to prefer those over any desktop. Eye-Fi’s making a bet, though, that despite our willingness to consider the smartphone’s apps and tools “good enough” for editing, we’re not entirely satisfied with our smartphone’s camera.

This is a good move for Eye-Fi, which risked becoming a super niche product for professional photographers who wanted to ship large photos to their desktops. While a majority of casual, smartphone picture-takers may never need this, anyone with a DSLR should take a look.

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

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Why retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-Fi

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