The app isn’t available just yet. But Realmac put up a website today with a very brief video showing how it works and what it will look like.

Realmac founder Dan Counsell told me via email that the camera app “was built with the same principles of Clear in mind.” That means employing a very simple user interface, flat, uncluttered design and an app that’s focused on one main thing; in this case taking and sharing photos.

Analog Camera is a good-looking app. Yes, it includes filters like every other photo app, but it also allows for a quick succession of shots to be taken. Then there’s a grid for helping to more easily select the best shot taken and best filter.

Analog Camera also includes easy sharing within the app to Facebook and Twitter; so it’s a camera app with social features, but unlike Instagram does not come with its own attached social network.

Realmac expects Analog Camera to hit the iOS App Store “later this month.”

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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.

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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.

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A new study has found that people who were shown a Facebook status update and then a sentence from a book were 1.5 times more likely to remember the status update. And users who were shown a status update and a photo of a person’s face were 2.5 times more likely to remember the text than the photo. While much of the focus in social media is centered on photos right now, the research validates the idea that status updates can have real staying power with our brains, because we recognize it as something closer to actual human speech.

The study, conducted by researchers from the UK and U.S. and published in the Memory and Cognition journal, found that text written for Facebook updates fell into the category of “mind-ready” information, meaning our brains more easily took in the text and committed it to memory because of its conversational, unedited nature that’s more like human speech. And in a second test, they found that it wasn’t just the gossipy nature of Facebook that had an impact — conversational tweets or online comments had a similar effect. (So maybe all those grammar-challenged updates from your friends aren’t as awful as you thought, as long as they sound like something your friends would say.)

In other words, you’re more likely to remember this:

“I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome. I’m making a Fred’s steak.”

Than this:

But aside from giving you a pass on your Facebook grammar, the study has implications for almost everyone using the platform. The researchers noted that Facebook is updated more than 30 million times an hour. As the company works to build out its search capabilities and give you access to all the text and information posted from your friends, it’s worth noting that the text — and not just the photos that Facebook is known for — has real value. And that advertisers and marketers posting content on the platform should think closely about what resonates.

Aka, we should totes wr8te 4 actual people, bro.

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In the latest incident, the site put together a collection of images that were created using the long-exposure function on some cameras. But it wasn’t just a regular post — the collection was created for Samsung as part of BuzzFeed’s “native advertising” or sponsored content program, where the site creates a post and tries to get it shared by users in the same viral way that its regular posts are (the post, entitled “14 Amazing Photos That Were Totally Not Photoshopped,” appears to have been removed but there’s a Google cache version here).

Creating sponsored content with borrowed images

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has made it clear that he sees this kind of native advertising content as the future of digital-media monetization (something he will be talking about as part of our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York City). But if the site continues to run into allegations of copyright infringement based on the pictures or other content it uses in these sponsored posts, that could make it somewhat harder to sell clients on the idea — and with its recent venture funding, the pressure on the company to toe the line is only likely to increase.

Web sites should start with the notion that if they cannot find a photographer's contact info for a picture, it is unavailable for use.

—
Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) January 11, 2013

The problem for BuzzFeed, and for plenty of other online-media players, is that the line they need to toe when it comes to copyright infringement is so blurry. Particularly when it comes to photos, the difference between blatant infringement and “fair use” is not easy to define — although many armchair legal scholars (including many of BuzzFeed’s critics) would like to pretend that it is. When it takes a court more than three years to determine whether Google’s use of thumbnails in an image search qualifies as fair use, it’s safe to say the issue is complicated.

To some, it seems obvious that taking someone’s photo from another source and using it without permission is infringement. But what if that photo is a slightly modified version of a photo that has appeared elsewhere? Who owns the rights? In some cases, the pictures BuzzFeed uses can be easily traced to their creators — as Wired pointed out in a previous incident involving a professional photographer, who later settled with the site over the use of her photo. In other cases, it’s not obvious. (BuzzFeed has also been sued for using celebrity photos without permission, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out).

BuzzFeed says it is trying to improve

Peretti told me in an email the same thing he said to Mashable: that is, he regrets any offence caused by using some of the photos that came from Reddit in the campaign, and agrees the site should try to track down the original posters (one of the criticisms that is often levelled at BuzzFeed is that it provides links to the photo itself on a third-party hosting provider like Imgur rather than to the original source). In his email message, he said:

“We were very concerned that we upset people in the photography subreddit. We immediately addressed the complaint… and posted an update in the reddit thread. The BuzzFeed post was designed to show how cool that sort of photography is so we regret making these awesome, creative people upset. We’d be happy to talk to any of them directly to figure out how to work together with photographers active on imgur.”

So how hard should BuzzFeed have to try in order to find the original creator? And if it can’t find them, should it be allowed to use the photo or not? It’s easy to see the site as the bad guy, taking people’s photos without asking and trying to make money from them — but the reality is that “remix culture” or whatever we choose to call it has become commonplace online, for better or worse. Photos and videos are edited, remixed, combined and uploaded thousands of times until the original owner of the various parts may be almost impossible to determine. Why is using such a photo not fair use?

The biggest issue is that “fair use” itself is such a thorny concept. Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but definitions are all over the map. In part, that’s because it is a horrendously complex legal principle that is based on four often conflicting factors (purpose of the original work, amount of the original that is used, the purpose of the infringing work and the effect on the market for the original). But as complex as it is, it’s also a crucial part of the foundation of the social web, whether we choose to admit that or not.

These are not easy questions to answer, by any means — but they are becoming increasingly important for sites like BuzzFeed (and even Reddit itself) to grapple with head-on, especially since so much of their financial future depends on making sense of whose content they are using and how.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/mtkang and Shutterstock/Lightpoet

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I don’t really have any proof of this, other than the growing popularity of such apps — as well as anecdotal evidence from discussions with a number of young friends and family members about the impact that Facebook in particular and the web in general (YouTube, blogs, etc.) have had on their lives. Whenever the topic of embarrassing photos or Facebook updates comes up, someone will say: “I’m jealous of old people because they didn’t have the internet and Facebook when you were young — you could get away with just about anything.” And for the most part, they are right.

When we swung a pole around and pretended it was a light-saber, the biggest risk was that someone would enter the room and see us, or maybe a friend with a hidden camera might record us. There was no risk that the video would be uploaded to YouTube and viewed more than 25 million times, turning us into an internet phenomenon known as the “Star Wars Kid” — and forcing us to seek psychological therapy because of the ridicule. We didn’t have to scrub our Facebook profiles of late-night debauchery in order to apply for a job, or manage our Twitter timeline during a relationship, or decide who would get control of our Facebook social graph after we split up with our partner.

We all have things we would like to have disappear

Every few weeks, it seems, we see another story about a celebrity who has been caught doing something via a text message or a photo shared on Twitter, or an incident that brings home how complicated privacy is now — like Randi Zuckerberg’s photo of her family reacting to her brother’s new Poke feature, which was inadvertently made public by someone else. In that kind of context, who wouldn’t be attracted to an app like Snapchat or Poke, where one of the main attributes of the content is that it is impermanent (although my colleague Eliza Kern has explained that it isn’t really impermanent at all, or at least not as ephemeral as it seems). For a generation whose every move has been chronicled — either by themselves or by someone else — in full public view, what better solution than photos that self-destruct?

In a TechCrunch post on Snapchat, the writer talks about how his younger sister (who is 19) shares totally different photos through the service than she would with another app like Instagram or even Facebook. But the point is not that she’s sexting — it’s that she no longer cares how her pictures look to others. Using other services like Instagram, the idea is to have a picture that gets shared and favorited as many times as possible, or gets approving comments from other users. The idea behind Snapchat is almost the exact opposite: it doesn’t matter how good it is, because only one person will see it, and even then they will only see it for a matter of seconds.

Developer and entrepreneur Dustin Curtis wrote recently about how this aspect of the service makes it seem much more like conversation — short, ephemeral, etc. — rather than a standard photo-sharing service, and how appealing that is to someone who is used to the relative permanence of Facebook and other services.

“Because it is completely ephemeral – and because the photos are deleted after 1-10 seconds – it’s impossible to use the photos for anything but communication.”

We want permanence for some things but not for others

There have been attempts to bring this same kind of auto-destruct feature to other kinds of content: one that Betaworks founder John Borthwick showed me earlier this year was called Vibe, and the idea was that messages could be shared with two specific restrictions — one was geographical (only share this with people in a specific location) and one was time-based (only share this for a certain length of time). It got a lot of use during the Occupy Wall Street movement as a way of co-ordinating activity among protesters, Borthwick said. Some email services have also tried to offer a time-limited function, so that messages would self-destruct after a certain period.

What’s interesting about this desire for impermanence is that there also seems to be a movement towards recapturing our past in some ways, whether it’s services like Timehop or Momento (which track your social activity and then remind you of things that happened a year ago) or through an archive of our tweets, which Twitter just started providing to users recently. If any service was designed to be ephemeral, or to emphasize the fact that social behavior is a stream, it’s Twitter — and yet now the archetypal impermanent network is offering a permanent record.

In some ways, this is an eternal tension that plays itself out online: we want some things to be as impermanent as possible (especially our mistakes, or the things we don’t want the government or Google to see), but at the same time we want to keep certain things around so that we can recapture the treasured moment when we took a photo, or got a message from a loved one. Maybe we need a setting that applies to all our online content — a dial that we can turn from “self-destruct in 10 seconds” to “keep in my private archive forever.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and IloveJB123

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The company noted that this version of Instagram has a limited issue where some iOS users with the new version who set their photos to private might not appear to have done so when looking at their settings page, a display error that Instagram said it is “actively” working to fix. The company confirmed that as long as photos are set to private, they will indeed be private – as explained on on the help page for this topic — even if the settings page shows otherwise. Users can check their profile screen where they can see follower counts to confirm this, where the display is accurate. Presumably the company will fix the display issue quickly, since needless to say, photo privacy has been a hot button topic recently.

Update: An Instagram spokeswoman confirmed Friday morning that the glitch had been fixed, and the privacy displays are now accurate across the app.

The iOS6 recognition, which will allow Instagram users to sign up for the app without ever heading to Facebook’s screen, comes as the two companies continue to slowly merge together after this fall’s finalized acquisition. With billions of users, it’s becoming more and more likely to that new converts to Instagram might already have a Facebook account, enabling an easier sign-up process.

The company is adding support for 25 new languages, including Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and others. While Instagram isn’t a particularly text-based app, the additions will provide sign-up instructions for those languages, and with apps like Path finding great success in non-U.S. markets including Asia, this addition makes sense. Camera updates include the fact that front-facing camera photos will no longer show up as mirrored, or flipped, and users can select photos from places other than the camera roll, helpful for people who organize photos in multiple folders.

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But Yahoo is ready to compete again in the mobile photo market, which continues to heat up with Twitter’s addition of photo filters this week. Flickr is rolling out a new iPhone app which it hopes can make the photo service a daily destination for mobile users. The overhauled app is packed with upgrades and design changes like better social sharing, photo editing (yes, filters) and discovery tools that finally make Flickr competitive in mobile. But is it too late? I worry that it is, but there’s enough there to make me wonder.

Here’s a look at some of the upgrades:

• Flickr users can now post to Facebook and Tumblr and it has easier sharing through Twitter now. That seems like a no-brainer but the Flickr app wasn’t particularly social before. Now, even the sign-in is designed to rely on Facebook, though users can also log in with their Yahoo account.
• Flickr offers editing tools via Aviary, which also provides the tools for its website. Users can just apply one of 16 filters or they can go deeper with tools for enhancing the shot, cropping it or adjusting for brightness, contrast, redeye, etc. This allows Flickr users to get in on the filter craze if they want.
• The photo viewing experience is improved. Users can zoom in on shots, which are kept in high resolution and they can tilt their phone to go full screen. You can tap on an image to see the details of the shot, kind of like viewing the back site of a photograph. Flickr has applied its justified web view, so images are also stacked up nicely together when viewing a photo set.
• Flickr is emphasizing more discovery of photos. So now, users can get two streams of photos to check out. There’s a Contacts/Group tab that lets you browse through photos from friends and the groups you’ve joined. Flickr recommends photographers and groups to follow if you don’t have a lot of them already. And there’s a new Explore tab that lets you see interesting and nearby photos. I actually like the Explore tab because it’s a pretty awesome set of photos and shows off how Flickr is a repository of really high-quality images.
• Uploading images is easier now since there’s no limit to how many photos you can upload from a camera roll. Previously, you were limited to 10 photos at a time. Also, users can still enter data about a photo and that now includes venue information through Foursquare.

Taken together, this is a huge set of improvements for Flickr. It’s amazing that the previous iPhone app was basically untouched for the last year. The new improvements help Flickr reassert itself as a player but the market has moved on in a lot of ways. People have flocked to very simple mobile photo sharing services like Instagram, Mobli and others. Facebook and Twitter are also very much in the mix. Flickr is still popular with serious photographers but it has to work hard to remind people it’s great for the kind of fun sharing that is the norm now for many smartphone users.

Markus Spiering, Flickr’s head of product, understands that Flickr has fallen behind in mobile. But he said the team has been working to get it right in mobile, which he said is now a huge focus for Flickr. And Flickr is still a popular destination for photo lovers, with 80 million monthly users and more than 8 billion photos. The challenge is for Flickr to regain some relevance in mobile while still being known as a great place to store and manage big, quality photo collections.

“We see Flickr as a place where people want to share photos for the community around photography but we really take care about the image quality and integrity,” Spiering told me. “While we have a lot of these value that are unmatched, what we are now doing is creating a compelling mobile experience for that.”

This is something Flickr should have done from the start. It was a leader in photos before Facebook and Instagram, but it didn’t embrace mobile and social. Doing so now is necessary, but I’m doubtful that Flickr can make up for lost time. Still, it’s nice to see Yahoo shipping some solid updates now. That’s two in two days along with yesterday’s Mail update.

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In a lengthy blog post explaining its own new product (strangely named Blobstore), Twitter explained how it moved on from using Photobucket beginning in September:

“Millions of people turn to Twitter to share and discover photos. To make it possible to upload a photo and attach it to your Tweet directly from Twitter, we partnered with Photobucket in 2011. As soon as photos became a more native part of the Twitter experience, more and more people began using this feature to share photos. In order to introduce new features and functionality, such as filters, and continue to improve the photos experience, Twitter’s Core Storage team began building an in-house photo storage system. In September, we began to use this new system, called Blobstore.”

Twitter just rolled out a photo filter and editing product on Monday, but has been hosting photos uploaded via the service since September following the introduction of the new system. Clearly storing and managing those photos is a top priority as the volume increases, because photos have become a vital parts of a social network.

Photobucket has worked to re-invent itself in the new era of social photos, when most people are sharing their pictures to Facebook, Instagram, and now likely Twitter, instead of older photo-storage services like Flickr, Webshots, or Photobucket.

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The header photos aren’t visible in the main Twitter feed, and might not seem like a consequential part of a user’s Twitter experience, except they turn a user’s profile page into more of a landing page for that person’s Twitter presence, and emphasize photos in the ongoing “photo war” between Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, all of whom are competing to keep users engaged and uploading images to the respective sites.

A Twitter blog post explains how to add header photos, and points out examples of media personalities and celebrities who’ve integrated the header photo into their profiles, greater evidence of Twitter’s play to become more of a media company.

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