While many of us purchase Valentine’s day cards for our significant others and perhaps a nice bouquet of flowers Kaitlyn Trigger decided to give her boyfriend a much bigger and involved present, a brand new photo sharing platform.

Kaitlyn’s Lovestagram program is so thoughtful because her boyfriend is Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and it’s his platform she chose to use when creating Lovestagram.

The program is essentially an interactive Valentine’s card maker that implements the Instagram API to create Valentine’s Day cards.

The program works by creating a slideshow of all Instagram photos you share with your special someone by using mutual username tags, photos you took in the same location within one hour of each other and photos where comments have been exchanged.  read more

Tumblr has actively been attempting to showcase the networks talents lately, ast week the company hired two veteran journalists to cover the sites best content and now they have hired several emerging fashion bloggers to kick off New York Fashion Week.

Tumblr on Wednesday announced on its staff blog that they have partnered with Milk Studios, a photography and studio conglomerate who will take a team of five “local emerging voices in fashion from Tumblr to cover the events” to cover the events.

Readers of the massive blog network can find information using the NYFW tag or they can follow these five bloggers: Alex, Bryant, Chloe, Lucie and Miguel

News of this type of “intimate” interaction was a smart move for Tumblr after BetaBeat in September broke news of the company’s attempt to monetize New York Fashion Week by selling premium ads to willing brands. BetaBeat wrote at the time: read more

Google Inc. on Monday removed content from various blogger specific domains in India after the countries leaders warned a “China type response” if the company didn’t better censor content deemed “religiously inappropriate.”

The request comes one week after Google announced plans to censor blogger platform content in certain countries through specific URL domain protocols. For example a post may be banned in India but still show up in a country where freedom of speech is available.

Speaking about the request Google representative Paroma Roy Chowdhury  noted:

“(Our) review team has looked at the content and disabled this content from the local domains of (Google) search, Youtube and Blogger.” read more

With hundreds of millions of Facebook users now engaging on the social network through the use of Android, iPhone and iPad apps it was only a matter of time before the company began serving ads to those platforms and that time now appears to be as early as March.

Sources close to the world’s largest social network say executives at Facebook have already discussed proposed advertising plans with advertising agencies and plan to offer paid “Featured stories” in mobile news feeds as a way to supplement ad space on smaller mobile device displays.

By mixing in sponsored ads with friends feeds users don’t lose screen space and only receive ads that match their interests and the interests of their friends.

Facebook has estimated that almost half of its 845 million users access the network via mobile devices, even one ad served per user per day would mean billions of new ad impressions for the network.  read more

Tumblr has been busy lately, yesterday they announced the hiring of two veteran journalists to help cover their growing network of more than 44 million blogs and today they rolled out a new way to show off your work with “highlighted posts.”

Here’s what Tumblr has to say about the new program:

Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo.

Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice! read more

Social blog service Tumblr has hired two journalists to help cover the networks extensive community.

Well known writers Chris Mohney, SVP of content for BlackBook Media and Jessice Bennett, senior writer and editor for Newsweek and The Daily Beast have been hired to cover various areas of content and conversation for the network which includes nearly 44 million blogs.

The task of covering Tumblr won’t be easy, as Bennett told Time:

“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million, I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

The main idea will be to showcase bloggers use Tumblr to better showcase their work in creative, fun and unique ways. The writers will post their stories on the Tumblr staff blog while a new Tumblr site will likely be created to showcase their efforts.

read more

In December 2011 PhoenDog LLC filed a lawsuit against company blogger and Smartphone reviewer Noah Kravitz after he changed the company’s Twitter page to his old name, essentially stealing the websites Twitter followers after leaving the organization. On Wednesday U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James said she will allow the case against him to move forward.

In filing a lawsuit against Noah PhoneDog LLC claims he owes them $340,000, the equivalent of $2.50 per follower.

If you’re unfamiliar with the case Kravitz started the Twitter account @Phonedog_Noah while working for several years at PhoneDog, when he left the company in October 2010 he changed the handle to @noahkravitz and kept the 17,000 followers he had amassed during his time at PhoneDog.

Speaking about the courts decision Kravitz’s lawyer Cary Kletter said: read more

Less then a week after Twitter announced the censorship of Tweets in certain parts of the world search giant Google has announced a similar program targeted at the company’s blogger platform.

To reach the company’s new censorship goal GOogle will begin redirecting Blogger users to country-specific URLs for example instead of a Google.com blog in France the content would direct the users to Google.fr.

By adding country specific URLs Google can censor a blog post in one country but leave it untouched for example in the United States. read more

While social bookmarking site Pinterest might be two years old the sharing platform really came into it’s own during the second half of 2011 and now the company is the top traffic referrer for retail based websites.

If you’re unfamiliar with Pinterest the program essentially allows users to create “pinboards” which are the equivalent of an online bulletin board for popular categories such as food, wedding planning, home decorating, etc. As users find interesting information online they can use the “Pin It” bookmarklet or their iPhone app to save things both from online and offline solutions.

As more users create bulletin boards and share their findings with friends traffic is sent to retailers. That traffic according to Experian Hitwise is driven by 58% women which is of special interest to advertisers, brands and retailers.  read more

InstaBG is a simple to use program that allows users to pull in various Instagram photos to create awesome Twitter backgrounds for their personal accounts. By simply giving the program access to your Twitter profile you can not only create a nice background but have it auto-updated with fresh picture content each day.

I personally find that InstaBG is great for photographers who want to showcase their most recent digitally stored photographs with very little effort.

To get started you’ll first visit InstaBG.com where you will be greeted with the following display: read more