Cellphone camera usage has taken off significantly in the past eight months alone, according to a “Summer Photo Usage Survey” sponsored by Photobucket, which polled more than 2500 participants during July. Fully 58 percent of respondents said they had used a camera phone to capture and share photos, up from 27 percent during the company’s 2010 Holiday Survey conducted in December.

Meanwhile, digital camera usage decreased six percent since the December survey, showing that cellphone cameras may well be replacing — not just complementing — traditional single-purpose photo gadgets.

Increasingly, people aren’t just using their cellphone cameras to capture static images. Forty-five percent of survey respondents said they use a mobile device to capture video at least once a week, while 17 percent said they use a mobile device to take video at least once a day.

But despite the overwhelming popularity of mobile phone cameras, people are showing some uncertainty about how exactly to share and store those snapshots and videos after they take them. Forty-one percent of survey respondents have photos uploaded to three or more different photo websites, which could indicate that people are confused by the ever-growing number of photo organization and sharing websites out there.

With Google sunsetting a number of its photo-sharing apps with the closure of its Slide division, consumers’ options have been narrowed slightly. But with the kind of blockbuster growth the segment is currently seeing, it’s safe to assume that the more mobile phone photos there are, more new apps and sites will pop up to host them, and a major shakeout is probably a bit further out on the horizon.

Image courtesy of Flickr user bareform.

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GigaOM was the first to report on the development of the “Apply with LinkedIn” plug-in in early June. By the looks of it, the plug-in that has been deployed has many of the features we had heard about pre-launch: Companies can customize the look of the button, add up to three specialized questions, prompt for a cover letter, and utilize certain data tracking technologies.

Now any company can embed the plug-in by adding an eight-line code snippet to its corporate website, LinkedIn said. More than a thousand companies are participating in the plug-in’s launch by including the Apply with LinkedIn button on their job pages, including Netflix, TripIt and Photobucket.

In a post published on LinkedIn’s corporate blog Monday morning, technical project manager Jonathan Seitel explained the service from the job applicants’ perspective this way:

Once you click on the “Apply with LinkedIn” button, you’ll get a user experience that’s been optimized for the web. In addition to updating your profile real time, LinkedIn will also show you your professional connections that work at the company to increase your chances of getting hired through a referral.

If you don’t know anybody at the company, we’ll show you people who can introduce you to someone there. This is extremely powerful –- statistics show that referrals are the #1 source of external hires at companies.

Finally, we record all “Apply with LinkedIn” submissions in the “Saved Jobs” tab (under the Jobs category on LinkedIn) so you have a record of all the jobs you’ve applied to around the web, throughout your career.

Here is a YouTube video explaining how “Apply with LinkedIn” works:

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Skylines, a Dutch startup focused on real-time photo search, has been analyzing the Twitter feed and has some unique insights into the market. From May 23 to June 26, 2011, Skylines found Instagram usage has gone up 38 percent: from 538,000 photos shared weekly to 740,000 photos shared each week.

Instagram CEO Systrom had recently observed that only 11 percent of Instagram members were using Twitter and by that metric, Instagram members might be adding about a million photos a day to Instagram. Add those two data points together, and one can extrapolate that Instagram is gathering steam. The service recently passed the five million subscriber mark. This level of engagement is one of the reasons why I believe Instagram has a chance of becoming the mobile social hub.

Skylines also shared some other data for the five-week period analysis.

• From May 23rd to June 26, 2011, there were 33 million photos shared on Twitter via Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Mobypicture (the four services indexed by Skylines).
• Twitpic is no slouch. It was responsible for sharing of 3.295 million photos during the week of June 20, making it the largest photo-sharing service.
• Yfrog was used to share 2.98 million photos during the same week.
• The growth in the total number of photos shared in the five-week period measured was 17 percent.
• Only 4 percent of the pictures are geo-tagged, while 15 percent have a hashtag.
• Not surprisingly, weekends are the most popular days to share photos.

As the data shows, while Twitter might have launched its own photo sharing service via Photobucket, the independent photo-sharing services have not seen any kind of slowdown, though there are some dark clouds looming ahead for the likes of Twitpic and Yfrog.

Here’s a video interview with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom.

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All photos shared within Twitter will be accompanied by a tag that reads “powered by Photobucket” and link to a page prompting users to sign in to a Photobucket account via Twitter. In a press release, Photobucket said it landed the Twitter collaboration in part because of its unlimited storage capabilities and mobile auto-upload technology. Since Photobucket currently has 100 million users and 8 billion uploads, the company said it is confident its service can scale to accomodate the needs of Twitter’s user base.

The Twitter deal is a major coup for Photobucket, which has recently been working overtime to reclaim its former spot at the top of the web industry. Photobucket was founded in 2003 and acquired by media giant News Corp. for $300 million in 2007. However, the company was sold off fewer than three years later after being the target of well-publicized DNS attacks and reported failures in corporate integration.

In an interview last month, Photobucket CEO Tom Munro told me the company devoted the bulk of 2010 to “transforming” itself back into fighting form after a rocky few years, and it appears that the effort is starting to pay off. With the Twitter deal, its newfound profitability, and an apparently serious appetite for M&A, it looks like Photobucket may indeed be back in the game for good.

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The Seattle-based company is actively looking at a number of potential acquisition targets, CEO Tom Munro told me in an interview this week. Photobucket is currently turning a profit and is “absolutely serious” about looking at bolt-on buys, he said, noting that the company would likely pay for deals with a mix of cash and stock. “We’re actually looking at a number of acquisition opportunities,” he said. “We’re not looking to acquire companies for user growth; we’re looking to acquire technologies.”

While Photobucket does not have much of a track record as an acquirer, Munro himself has both sell- and buy-side M&A experience. Most recently as CFO of photo software firm Ontela, he oversaw Ontela’s December 2009 acquisition of the Photobucket assets from News Corp.  Munro’s resume also includes time as CFO of software firm Vallent, where he handled several acquisitions before the company’s sale to IBM. He assumed the CEO role for Photobucket in October 2010.

The new focus on M&A is part of a larger strategy to aggressively add more user-friendly applications in the months ahead. Photobucket’s first step in this new direction came Wednesday, with the debut of an Instagram-like app called Snapbucket, which allows users to add filters and effects to photos and share them through social networks.

A lot has changed in the online photo space since Photobucket’s inception in 2003. Facebook is now far and away the Internet’s top photo sharing destination, with more than 2.5 billion photos being added to the site every month. The iPhone with its increasingly awesome camera capabilities has created a gold rush for mobile app developers and led to runaway successes like Instagram.

Meanwhile, Photobucket has had a rocky few years. The company was acquired by media conglomerate News Corp. for $300 million in 2007 , only to be sold off in late 2009 after suffering from highly publicized DNS attacks and reported failures in corporate integration.

Photobucket has spent the better part of 2010 “transforming” itself, Munro told me. “We brought in a new attitude and a new management team, and got the business back to profitability.”

In our interview, Munro made it clear that Photobucket is highly motivated to get back in the game. The ambition will probably come in handy for the company, which has quite a bit of catching up to do. Whether the innovation comes from building new technology or buying it, Photobucket’s big challenge for 2011 is getting up to speed in what is now a very competitive space.

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Acquirers, despite their enormous and asymmetrical audience, money, and power compared to their purchases, seem like awkward first-time parents afraid of hurting a baby. They are more than conscious of their status as old farts swooping in and quickly turning cool to lame.

The idea at the time was that online “community” was something big companies just didn’t get. “We have to keep the communities, otherwise what is the point,” CBS Interactive’s Quincy Smith told us. “Photobucket is going to be left alone, because it is doing what it is doing,” said News Corp.’s Peter Chernin.

The strategy didn’t quite work, with Last.fm and Photobucket’s leadership now departed, not to mention Smith and Chernin as well. And today, MySpace announced that it’s getting rid of Photobucket entirely for what’s surely less than the $250 million plus a $50 million earnout it gave the company in 2007. The deal, which had been scooped by TechCrunch a couple months ago, merges Photobucket with camera phone software maker Ontela. News Corp. maintains a significant equity stake in the merged company, to be called Photobucket, and puts its digital head, Jon Miller, as a director.

That’s not to say all web community sites left alone don’t grow; for instance, Google’s YouTube and Yahoo’s Flickr are doing quite all right. But it’s true that neither acquirer was a media company.

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If Facebook’s experience was any indication, it’s smart thinking. The social networking site was the first company to try out GetJar’s new offering, which saw a link posted on the Facebook mobile page that prompted people to download its app. The number of Facebook app downloads on GetJar have topped 10 million since it began its trial of the new service in August, according to the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup, from just 2.5 million.

In addition to Facebook, photo- and video-sharing web site Photobucket will start implementing the App Download Page service this quarter and GetJar said news- and entertainment-focused companies are also lined up to use the service soon, though it declined to name any of them. Nor would the startup comment as to whether or not it had a financial arrangement with Photobucket tied to that site’s use of GetJar’s service.

GetJar received $6 million in funding from Accel Partners in 2007.

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MySpace is launching its data availability efforts with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and Photobucket some time within the next several weeks. Steve Pearman, SVP of product strategy at MySpace, says other partners will be able to join “in a few weeks,” after agreeing to some basic terms and conditions aimed at preventing user data from being abused. I asked if someone could port their MySpace info onto their Facebook page if Facebook asked to join, to which Pearman responded by saying he wouldn’t want to tell anyone where they could or could not port their data.

Users can go to their MySpace page and access controls that will allow them to instantly opt out of sharing their data with sites if they decide to change their minds. In time, users will be able to select which aspects of their MySpace information they want to share with sites, but for now it’s an all-or-nothing decision.

Update: So after sitting in on the conference call, I get the idea that MySpace wants to be the “Intel Inside” of the social web. However, unlike the easy-to-monetize business of selling hardware, the business of controlling someone’s Internet persona and profile doesn’t have an obvious monetization strategy.

When asked how this data availability initiative will help MySpace, CEO and cof-ounder Chris DeWolfe said it falls in line with MySpace’s core principals to create a more open and social Internet, that it “takes the notion of third-party widgets and OpenSocial to the next level.”

Pearman responded to a direct question about monetization by talking about how a rising tide lifts all boats, but didn’t provide any detail as to how MySpace can sell more ads, especially if it’s sending its users to other parts of the web while making it easy for others to avoid joining the social networking site.

This morning, News Corp. said revenue dropped for MySpace and its Fox Interactive Media division because it’s hard to sell advertising on social networks. Problems include too many players going after advertisers, which is driving the CPMs down; the fact that most people aren’t going to the site with a mindset appropriate for viewing ads; and figuring out appropriate metrics to measure the success of online campaigns.

Monetization may be murky right now, but I do think controlling someone’s digital persona is worth something. And make no mistake — MySpace is still controlling this data, even as it gives users the ability to ship it across the web. Unless a site actually agrees to MySpace’s terms and conditions, a user can’t port their data to it, leaving the decision about where data goes in MySpace’s hands rather than the user’s. That control may derive from benign intents to prevent the abuse of user data, but users are still locked into MySpace’s walled garden.

So, the question for monetizing that data will be whether or not MySpace can use it in a way that makes it money without hacking off privacy advocates.

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