Hasta La Gadget!

In this age of digital photography, a picture can be transformed a thousand ways, made to look like a Polaroid snapshot or an antique image, given a moody or artistic or saturated look. Instagram, the social photography app, allows smartphone users to take a picture, apply a filter, and then send it off into the social networking sphere. Now, according to sources, Twitter is poised to take on the popular photography service by adding photo filters to its own mobile app.

The changes to Twitter’s mobile app are supposed to happen “in the coming months,” and will allow users to apply effects to photos directly without needing Instagram as a middle man. In addition, the sources claim that Twitter is also looking into adding other features to its app, including the ability to directly edit and upload videos. Presently, users must go through YouTube, Vimeo, or other video sharing websites.

According to the New York Times, the sources are Twitter employees who do not want to be named because they’re supposed to be staying mum on the project. Says one employee, Twitter’s “Very Important Tweeters,” namely big name celebs, would be “especially happy” for the addition of photo filters to Twitter’s mobile app due to their frequent use of Instagram to send pictures to their Twitter accounts. A Twitter spokesperson declined commenting on the claim.

This claim comes shortly after Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $715 million. The acquisition prompted Twitter to consider the purchase of its own photo service, with sources saying that both Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey and executive chairman Dick Costolo were involved in the process. Ultimately, the company elected to build its own filters instead.

[via The New York Times]

Twitter to compete with Instagram by adding photo filters, says sources is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Given that Instagram has a community of its own and that people do subscribe to other Instagram accounts, naturally @mentions do pop up ever so often. However those @mentions could get confusing especially when you have friends on Twitter and Instagram who have different handles. This might be because their username was already taken on Twitter/Instagram which means that had to come up with an alternative. Granted it’s not a huge inconvenience but it could get confusing once in a while. Well the good news is that if you’re an avid user of both Twitter and Instagram along with your friends, Instagram has updated itself and will now “magically” translate @mentions for users whose Twitter and Instagram handles differ. Like we said, it’s not a huge inconvenience before but we guess now it’s just one less thing to think about. If you’d like to learn more about this update, head on over to Instagram’s blog for the details.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Instagram drops ‘Find Twitter Friends’ feature, Twitter has no interest in buying an Instagram of their own,

Instagram is no doubt a popular app used to take photos on both iOS and Android, and we can still remember the day when it finally arrived on Android and the big deal that everyone made about it. Well it seems that the fuss people made about the Android version might not happen for Blackberry 10 as Facebook has announced (via VentureBeat) that they have no plans to release Instagram for Blackberry 10. As some of you guys are aware, Facebook bought Instagram awhile back and while Facebook is working on a native app for Blackberry 10, it seems that’s the extent of Facebook’s involvement with Blackberry 10.

Of course this does not mean that there won’t be Instagram for Blackberry 10 forever – there is a chance that Facebook could be feeling out the Blackberry 10 ecosystem first before deciding if it might be worth their while to port Instagram onto Blackberry 10. In any case Blackberry 10 is expected to launch in Q1 of 2013, so there’s still a few months for Facebook to change their minds. In the meantime it looks like would-be Blackberry 10 users will need to find an alternative way to capture and upload hipster-like photos.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Images of Facebook app for BlackBerry 10 leaked, Blackberry 10 expected to launch with more apps than any other first-generation mobile operating system,