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

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

Twitter on Friday received a long awaited brand endorsement when athletic apparel and equipment maker Nike finally joined the social network with the account @Nike.

At the time of this post Nike has managed to amass 19,395 followers during the accounts first day in existence.

Almost immediately following the Twitter accounts release major athletes began following the brand including Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Steve Nash among others.

The move to Twitter shows Nike’s dominance over the market after the company managed to rack up more followers than Adidas in less than a 24 hour period. read more

Instagram has become a photo sharing sensation, allowing users to organize their photos and share them across a vast mobile network, now thanks to the website InstaBG.com users can share their own photos and the photos of other publicly available albums with a simple and sleek interface that auto updates daily and offers plenty of customization.

The program couldn’t possibly be any easier to use, once a user clicks on “Sign in with Twitter Account” they are asked to verify their Twitter credentials and approve the application for use.

Next a screen displays that shows users a list of options they can choose from: read more

Since it’s launch the popular photo sharing service Instagram has only been available for Apple iOS based devices and now the company has announced plans to launch a Google Android version of the program, a smart decision given Google’s nearly 50% smartphone market share.

With the launch of the new application Instagram believes they can double their current user database which includes more than 50 million active users.

Speaking at LeWeb in Paris Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom revealed:

“We have two people working on Android now,” and “I’m excited to be able to see our numbers today nearly double.”

At this time there is no timeline for the launch of the new Android app and Systrom wasn’t exactly forthcoming with details for the new program.  read more

In case you missed them we have five stories from 9/5/11 through 9/9/11 that you should be sure to check out. Whether you’re a Facebook user with multiple admin pages, a Foursquare users trying to figure out why your friends haven’t adapted the technology or an Instagram fan we have something this week that you’ll find engaging. Also be sure to check out our post about the Google acquisition of Zagat and Google’s big plans for the Google +1 button.

Facebook Security Flaw Let’s Users Hijack Pages From Original Owners 

Facebook pages are meant to provide users with a forum to share a specific interest or set of interests, this week it was discovered that page creators could be booted from their own pages by administrators who they assigned to help moderate their public forums. Facebook FAQ say that type of activity isn’t allowed but it was discovered to be a possibility.

Smartphone Users Less Likely To Checkin Than Perform Other Tasks [Study]

Smartphone users love to play Angry Birds, even check their email, text message and make phone calls, what they don’t care much for is the ability to “check-in” at locations using location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. This article examines numbers provided by a recent Pew Research Survey and shows that less than 15% of users have taken to location based services and even fewer of those users are checkin-in each day.

Here Comes Instagram: Infographic

Instagram is quickly becoming a juggernaut in the social sharing photo platform world. While Flickr took 2 years to reach 100 million photos, Instagram reached that same level in just 8 months while attracting 7 million users in just nine months. This infographic shows the incredible speed at which Infogram has become a big player in the photo sharing world. read more

The Rise In Popularity Of Instagram

With the increasing popularity of social media communication, here comes another application that’s been creating a huge buzz around the internet for a while now: the image uploading app. Instagram. Instagram is so popular that it has gained more than 4.5 million users in less than a year. Like Twitter, members can follow your posts but instead of words, you get to post photos and then your follower can “like” your photos and leave you comments, for whatever reason, many people are fascinated by this. But what’s even more amazing about Instagram is that even professional fashion photographers and Hollywood celebrities are getting hooked by its immense popularity. It has even caught the attention of the number one social media site: FaceBook.

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Apparently the social networking giant is becoming a little envious of Instagram, as new rumors are emerging that Facebook is releasing an iOS app to challenge the photo sharing novice.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook is secretly building an iOS app that borrows the best from Instagram, Color and Path (the latter which never really took off).

While it’s puzzling why Facebook would create a separate app for photos (which might confuse users), jumping in the photo sharing space is a smart move for Facebook as it would help them thwart the rise of new rivals like Twitter, as well as kill off current contenders like Flickr.

It’s still unclear whether Facebook will simply focus on photo sharing with filters (like Instagram), or integrate videos as well, although either way Facebook’s potential entrance into the market is probably sending shivers down everyone’s spine save Twitter.

For those of you addicted to photo sharing services like Instagram, Flickr or (for the few) Path, what are your thoughts regarding Facebook’s rumored app?

Would you consider dumping your current photo sharing service for Facebook, or would you continue to use alternatives instead of the social networking king?

Image Credit: TechCrunch

For those of you unfamiliar with the photo social network known as Instagram, it’s basically a cross between Flickr and Twitter (with a dozen plus photo filters to help spice things up).

Despite being only 7 months old and operating underneath Facebook’s and Flickr’s shadow, Instagram has become a blockbuster hit with the site now adding over a million users per month!

Co-Founder Kevin Systrom revealed Instagram’s latest stats upon TechCrunch Disrupt, and announced that the platform now boasts 4.25 million users who are uploading an average of 10 photos per second.

What’s incredible about Instagram’s growth is the fact that users can only access  and upload photos via an iOS device (or rather the iPhone as Instagram lacks an iPad app).

Note: Instagram is rumored to be working on an Android app, although they refuse to give an ETA on when it will appear upon Android Market.

Instagram’s biggest rival (aside from Flickr) is probably Path.com, whose iOS only strategy has not yielded similar results.

Have you tried Instagram? If so, what are your favorite filters? Also do you think Instagram could challenge Flickr in the future?