Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that the giant social network, Facebook, has acquired the popular photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion. Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom has also confirmed the deal. The 13 full-time employees who will each receive part of a $100 million will move to the social network as a result. Not to mention Instagram has 30 million active users and recently debuted a hot new Android app.

Facebook’s official press release is here:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Acquires Interactive iPad Book Maker: Push Pop Press
2. Facebook for iPad App Coming Soon
3. Facebook Announces In-Browser Video Calling Powered By Skype
4. Hacker Group Anonymous Vows to Destroy Facebook on November 5
5. How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right Now

This morning Facebook announced Timeline, a look at everything that has ever happened in your Facebook lifespan. It’s like a story book of your life. Although the feature has been announced, it is not yet available to the public – only developers can get access.

Things to consider:

• You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs.
• Only you will see your timeline at first (unless you decide otherwise), but it will automatically go public after a few days. My timeline was automatically hard-set to go public on September 29th.
• It seems that if you login into Facebook on another machine, Timeline gets disabled automatically on all of your machines. With that said, it seems you can get back to your timeline (but ONLY after following the steps below) by navigating to http://www.facebook.com/YOURUSERNAMEHERE?sk=timeline
• You’ll need to have a “verified” account for one of the steps, which means you need a credit card or phone number attached to the account.

How to enable it:

Step 1: Log in to Facebook.

Step 2: You will need to enable developer mode if you haven’t already. Simply type “Developer” in the search box and click on the top result.

Step 3: Go to the developer app, which can be found here should Facebook not automatically redirect you.

Step 4: Create a new app (don’t fret, nobody will be able to see it), and give it a name and namespace (no CAPS allowed with the namespace).

Step 5: Once that’s done, click on the “Get Started using open graph” under the “Open Graph” header.

Step 6: You will then be asked to create a test action for your app, like “read” a “book”.

Step 7: Next, you’ll be met with a config page of your selected action. Navigate through that page and the next three pages of settings.

Step 8: Once you have gone through the last page and hit “Save and Finish”, after a couple of minutes, an invite to try Timeline should appear at the top of your homescreen.

Click it, and you will be met with a page which seemingly covers every story of your Facebook life since the day you joined. Enjoy!

[via TechCrunch]

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2. Facebook for iPad App Coming Soon
3. Facebook Announces In-Browser Video Calling Powered By Skype
4. Hacker Group Anonymous Vows to Destroy Facebook on November 5
5. Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion

Hacker group Anonymous, which has been responsible for cyber-attacks on the Pentagon, Sony, News Corp, hacked into Iran‘s government emails, possibly the IMF, Anders Breivik’s Twitter account, and much more, has a new target in its crosshairs: Facebook. The hackers have set the date for Facebook’s demise as November 5, 2011. The reason? Ironically, they’re worried about privacy.

Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Facebook account, Anonymous hopes to “kill Facebook,”. Anonymous leadership disowned Operation Facebook on Twitter.

So, only some Anonymous members are involved. This isn’t the first time Anonymous has spoken out against social networks. After Google removed Anonymous’ Gmail and Google+ accounts, Anonymous pledged to create its own social network, called AnonPlus.

The full text of the announcement, made on YouTube and reported by Village Voice, is below:

DATE: November 5, 2011.TARGET: https://facebook.com

Press:
Twitter : https://twitter.com/OP_Facebook

http://piratepad.net/YCPcpwrl09

Irc.Anonops.Li #OpFaceBook
Message:

Attention citizens of the world,

We wish to get your attention, hoping you heed the warnings as follows:
Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed. If you are a willing hacktivist or a guy who just wants to protect the freedom of information then join the cause and kill facebook for the sake of your own privacy.

Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your “privacy” settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you “delete” your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family. http://www.physorg.com/news170614271.html

http://itgrunts.com/2010/10/07/facebook-steals-numbers-and-data-from-your-iph….

You cannot hide from the reality in which you, the people of the internet, live in. Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause. You are not safe from them nor from any government. One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you.

The riots are underway. It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being raped, tickled, molested, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them “for their own good” while they then make millions off of you. When a service is “free,” it really means they’re making money off of you and your information.

Think for a while and prepare for a day that will go down in history. November 5 2011, #opfacebook . Engaged.

This is our world now. We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.

We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us

“Kill Facebook for the sake of your own privacy” — doesn’t that sound strange, coming from people who routinely steal private information as they please? But this echoes the manifesto of a related group, LulzSec, whose nihilistic perspective on the state of the Internet kind of made sense. An excerpt:

Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked? We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off? You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value.This is what you should be fearful of, not us releasing things publicly, but the fact that someone hasn’t released something publicly.

Will Anonymous be able to successfully lay waste to Mark Zuckerberg‘s fortress? This is set to be the Internet showdown of the year.

What is expected actually, is that Facebook would not be “destroyed,” per se. What’s more likely to happen is a DDoS (denial of service) attack on Facebook which could, if successful, prevent users from reaching the site for anywhere from minutes to hours.

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5. Facebook for iPad App Coming Soon

Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, the company behind iPad app “Our Choice,” based on a book by Al Gore. The company was co-founded by former Apple designer Mike Matas who was a lead designer of both the original iPhone and iPad interfaces. Facebook does not plan to sell interactive iPad books, but the technology and design talent will be used in Facebook’s future.

Mike Matas demoed “Our Choice” at the TED conference this year to rave reviews.

Statement from Facebook:

We’re thrilled to confirm that we’ve acquired Push Pop Press, a startup whose groundbreaking software changes the way people publish and consume digital content. We can’t wait for co-founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris to get started, and for some of the technology, ideas and inspiration behind Push Pop Press to become part of how millions of people connect and share with each other on Facebook.

[via allthingsd]

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3. Facebook For iPad Has Arrived [Updated]
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Diaspora unlike Facebook or Google+ is a decentralized Social Network run by distributed Web servers maintained by some of their own users in “pods”. The Project is still under Development stage and is an invite only signup. Diaspora is gaining popularity because of the privacy concerns haunting people in major social networking sites like Facebook and Google+ which are centralized.

For those of you who still haven’t registered for Google+, how about checking out Diaspora for the time being until that time. Diaspora allows invites of a limited number of users, so I will be giving some of you until we figure out a way for a possibility to send more invites. So follow these steps to land yourself an invite to the most popular closed social networking site available on the internet.

How to get invited?

follow the easy simple steps below:

1. Follow @iGradly on twitter or like the Facebook Page and share this on Facebook.
2. Tweet the post in the format given below with the username.

Get Free Diaspora invite Now | #Diaspora Free Giveaway – http://t.co/MFejI2X @iGradly #Giveaway

• After you done with the 2 steps , don’t forget to leave your comment on why you want to join Diaspora along with your email address, so that i can send you the invite to Diaspora.

Note: Please don’t post your email directly in the body of the comment to avoid spamming but instead you have a specific box for that to do so.

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After teasing an “awesome” announcement at the company for Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the chance to announce the launch of in-browser video calling powered by Skype.

See The Friends You Message Most
The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it’s easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough.

Create a Group Chat Instantly
We’re also launching multi-person chat, which is one of our most requested features. Now when your friends can’t figure out what movie to see, you can just add them to a chat and decide together. To include more friends in your conversation, simply select Add Friends to Chat and just like your other chats, the history of your conversation is available in messages.

Bring Your Conversations to Life
Video chat has been around for years now, but it’s still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it’s too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services.

So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.

Hopefully Facebook plans to bring these new video calling features to its rumored iPad application. You can get video calling enabled by hitting the link below.

Video calling will be available to everyone over the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, you can get it now.

Related posts:

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2. Facebook for iPad App Coming Soon
3. Microsoft To Acquire Skype For $8.5 Billion
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5. Microsoft Has Acquired Skype For $8.5 Billions

According to Google’s Erica Joy, an official Google+ iPhone application has been submitted to the App Store, and is currently awaiting Apple’s approval.

The news came via Erica Joy’s Google+ account, in an update that read:

For all my iPhone using friends: the Google+ iPhone app has been submitted to the App Store (no, not today, sometime prior to today) and is awaiting approval.

Google+, a brand new social network, launched recently, and it is something to take on Facebook dominance in social networks. If you were lucky enough and have got your hands on an invite you will definitely find a cool and refreshing new social network.

If Erica Joy’s update is anything to go by, we can expect a Google+ application to hit the App Store soon. and hopefully a universal app for iPhone and iPad for a real Facebook competition.

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Hacker George Hotz ‘GeoHot’, who recently settled a lawsuit with Sony for publishing a PlayStation 3 crack online, now works for Facebook. His exact position with the company is unclear, but he may be on a the development team tasked with building the social network’s new Pad app.

Geohot reportedly started working for Facebook last month but the announcement was made on 17th June only to be discovered today.

According to iDB:

We were just tipped off by the folks at Tech Unwrapped that George Hotz is now working for Facebook. Needless to say that I was a bit skeptical about the news and when I inquired for more details, I was pointed to GeoHot’s very own Facebook profile where he confirms that he is indeed working for Facebook…

According to Gabe Rivera, GeoHot started working for Facebook in May, but he only announced it on June 17. If you have a look at his Facebook profile, it’s pretty clear that he is not joking.

Hacker Joshua Hill, aka @p0isixNinja, who said in a recent interview that Hotz had made the move. Hill reportedly challenged Hotz to a iPad 2 jailbreak duel. Watch the live Q&A session:

Geohot is a well-known for having originally unlocked the iPhone for use on wireless carriers other than AT&T and also for hacking into Sony’s PlayStation 3 console back in January and later sued by Sony. The case settled later in April.

GeoHot is also known for iOS jailbreaking using a bootrom exploit found since iOS 4.1. The jailbreak tool called Limera1n and still in use since then.

[via Yahoo]

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Facebook is about to release an official iPad app, according to the NYT. Facebook has been working on it for approximately the past year and is closing up their testing ahead of a launch in the “coming weeks.” The Facebook for iPad is said to be “carefully designed and optimized for the tablet” and will be totally free:

People who have seen the application said it has a slick design that has been tailored for the iPad and its touchscreen interface. Facebook developers and designers have also overhauled the Facebook Chat and Facebook Groups features for the application. And the app will go beyond the features available on the Facebook Web site by allowing users to shoot and upload photos and videos directly from the iPad’s built-in cameras.

“The photo and video experience is amazing, offering full resolution and full-screen images,” said a person who has seen the app.

Facebook for iPad is said to include everything from the Facebook website but will add mobile-optimized features like taking and uploading pics directly from iPad’s built-in cameras.

Related posts:

1. Facebook For iPad Has Arrived [Updated]
2. Facebook Acquires Interactive iPad Book Maker: Push Pop Press
3. iPhone and PS3 Hacker George Hots ‘GeoHot’ Now Works For Facebook
4. Facebook Acquires Instagram for $1 Billion
5. iPad 2 Jailbreak By GeoHot is Coming

Facebook recently rolled out an update to its commenting system. Now, instead of pressing Comment, you simply press the Enter key to save a comment. More excitingly, however, Facebook silently rolled out another new feature at the same time: you can now edit comments!

When you comment on your friend’s status, photos or link, and want to edit your comment, simply press the ‘X’ in the top right corner to edit it. Your comment instantly turns into a text box where you can alter what you’ve written, then just press Enter again to save it.

Note: If someone send a comment after you, your comment will be blocked, but you still able to delete your comment by the same ‘X’ button. Also you have to know that you also have only 60 seconds to edit your comment.

It’s also worth noting that everyone still gets email (and SMS!) notifications when you comment, and when you edit comments.

Related posts:

1. Google Updates New Commenting Feature for Google Docs
2. Facebook Acquires Interactive iPad Book Maker: Push Pop Press
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5. Hacker Group Anonymous Vows to Destroy Facebook on November 5

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will reportedly join Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a meeting with US President Barack Obama in San Francisco on Thursday.

Though recent reports have alleged that Jobs’ health has continued to decline, the executive is scheduled to attend a business leaders’ event with President Obama Thursday evening, a source told ABC News.

Google’s Schmidt, who will step down as CEO in April; GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, the newly named chairman of the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and Facebook’s Zuckerberg will also be in attendance, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

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Facebook has started rolling out the new Messages system for everyone.

We’ve begun expanding the rollout of Messages to everyone on Facebook. This will happen gradually over the next few weeks.

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In an attempt to prove that Scary Movie’s jokes weren’t funny 11 years ago and still aren’t today, The Weinstein Company announced this morning on Facebook that Scary Movie 5 is, indeed, happening. Yup. Groan. Anyway, other than the simple statement, “Scary Movie 5 is announced by The Weinstein Company,” there haven’t been any other details announced, including no word on whether or not Anna Faris will reprise her role as Cindy Campbell.

So, is this a good announcement? Probably not. But in the franchise’s defense, the previous film (Scary Movie 4) was released about five years ago, which is plenty of time for the filmmakers to rethink what worked and what didn’t.

Each film cost under $50 million to produce and they’ve brought in over $818 million worldwide.

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xvxcvxc

Read what David Fincher had to say about the scene, check it out directly below and watch the scene again after that.

“The Henley Royal Regatta were incredibly good to us and they allowed us to actually shoot the race at Henley. I had no idea how huge the Henley Royal Regatta was. I’d only seen photographs and a lot of them are telephoto so you don’t get the idea of this mile-and-a-half of grandstands and corporate sponsors. I mean, it’s a huge thing and we originally thought we would shoot a bunch of inserts on the Charles [River] and then use that footage to intercut with wide shots we’d shot at Henley.

“The trick of this scene, and the thing that made it so difficult was, it’s not like the fight in Rocky where it’s been talked about forever and it’s importance has been established and you know what it means to the Winklevosses. You get dropped into the middle of this race, and I joked with Aaron [Sorkin] about it a lot, ‘How do I make people care about whether or not these guys win or lose a race that we don’t know where it is, we don’t know what it means?’ And he was like, ‘Well that’s your problem.’ [laughing]

“He was using it as a way of saying, ‘You miss by that much.’ Then to have the Winklevosses miss by that much with Mark Zuckerberg, they missed by that much with Larry Summers, they’re missing by that much at Henley and it’s the final straw.

“But it is a tricky thing to design a sequence around missing by that much when you literally get dropped into the middle of it. You really don’t know where you are, it requires a subtitle to tell you you’re now in Henley for the Henley Royal Regatta, which you probably don’t know is the Super Bowl of boat racing.

“So this was one of those sequences where the only time we could shoot it was July 4, 2010. It was literally five to six weeks before we had to finish the movie. The movie had to be done so we could get it in theaters, and they were incredibly helpful to us and made it all possible.

“We’d shot the post-Henley scene where they hear about Facebook, but the actual race itself was literally a one-minute-and-forty-second slug. I think when we showed the film to the New York Film Festival, where we showed the film to a lot of long-lead press it had a card that just said, ‘Incredibly involving and thrilling sequence at Henley Royal Regatta,’ that was it just a black card with white type on it. So when we finally got to shoot the scene it was a mad scramble to finish it.

“One of the reasons it was done in this faux, swing and tilt– tilting lens board style was because all of the close-ups of the Winklevosses and the Dutch rowing were done in Eton on a man made lake that doesn’t look anything like Henley. Doesn’t have any– just has green grass, but we would shoot the close-ups of all the people and then we had to matte in still photographs that we’d shot at Henley.

“There was a team of 20-35 artists who toiled around the clock to finish that sequence so we could get it out and get the movie done. And they did a great job.”

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4. More Details On PlayStation Network Hack
5. PlayStation Network User Information Compromised

- Go to Facebook App page take it on the track
- Play “Shot in the Dark“.

Choose Just play and finish the complete game and wait to the end

- Choose 5 peoples of your friends to do Grudge, or anytime after playing the game once you can click Create Grudge

Select any set of peoples and write what you want in the comment and click next

- Now the page is stuck in load state, wait for 5 minutes before you refresh the page

- Repeat Grudge for different People wait 5 minutes until you succeed.

- Finally go to your profile page and on the right side is your code

+ Source: GTPlanet

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Juste (dot) ru, the video scam that’s been spreading rapidly on Twitter, is actually a double-headed beast.

We’re now getting reports of the same video links being spammed through user accounts on Facebook, too. If you get a Facebook message with a link to Juste.ru, DO NOT click the link or visit the site – it appears to steal your credentials for both Twitter and Facebook, then abuse them to spread the scam further. Your Facebook friends get spam messages, and your Twitter followers get sent malicious Tweets.

This is perhaps the most vicious of social networking scams we’ve seen, affecting two networks simultaneously. Given that it’s able to grab logins from both sites, we’re assuming that it works by installing malware on the host machine, rather than simply asking for login details. We’ll continue to update once we have more information.

Current advisory: do not click links to “juste (dot) ru” on either Twitter or Facebook today. Also avoid any links on Facebook that simply say “Video” or “Best Video” – I’ve seen at least one example where it seems the link is hidden behind a short URL.

If you think you might be affected (ie. your Twitter or Facebook accounts are sending out spam links), run a full virus and spyware scan, clear your browser cookies and change your passwords on both services.

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