As the Tumblr/Yahoo deal continues to be negotiated by press, and the world gears up for whatever is being announced Monday morning, Tumblr founder David Karp is probably having a very interesting weekend. It’s likely, in between multiple discussions with his board members and Marissa Mayer, that he’ll take a break, like a walk or something, to gather his thoughts.

On this walk (or jog or glass of wine at a bar), he will likely mull over two main outcomes. He could take Yahoo’s money, whether it be the $1.1 billion that the board is trying to approve giving him, or the more that he negotiates. Or, well, not.

If he took Yahoo’s money, he would join the Billion Dollar Exit Club — you know, the ranks of Kevin Systrom, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen from YouTube, the PayPal mafia, Tony Hseih, James Clark, Marc Andreessen, etc. He would be considered “successful” by the Valley’s ridiculous standards and everyone else’s, but not Zuckerberg successful, but definitely Michael Birch successful. Maybe he’d buy a nice house in Presidio Heights for when he has to be on the West Coast, and fill it with art and an apartment in Chelsea? [And maybe a vacation home for his family. And maybe a plane.]

He’d still oversee the Tumblr product at Yahoo, at least until his lockup expired, and maybe users would leave and maybe they wouldn’t … But the game would be over. The race would be in its cool-down period. Still, a pretty chill life overall. Especially in this economy. What would Kevin Systrom do?

Sell.

But with this, just like with the Instagram sale, comes a nagging, cloying afterthought: “What if Tumblr (or Instagram or _______) could have been the next Facebook?” And this nagging opportunity cost would grow even louder if Yahoo succeeded with Tumblr, finding a way to monetize its millions of eyeballs much like Google did with YouTube.

“Tumblr could have been a contender.”

It’s this thought that will lead to a “No” from Karp and his board if it gets nagging enough. And this thought is weighty — Zuck had it too when he was being courted by Yahoo, and we all know how that turned out. But what happens after the “No,” the fact that Karp will be challenged to build a real business on top of Tumblr’s scale, is daunting enough to turn that “No” once again into a “Yes.”

Can Tumblr turn the process of following other Tumblrs through your dashboard into a stream it can monetize with sponsored, story-style ads? Or find a way to cram ads into the notoriously independent, and risky, content?

Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create a money-making machine? Because if he’s not sure, and he’s not ready for a long, hard, uphill fight, he should sell.

Look what happened to Groupon; still trading below its $6bn offer.

A billion dollars is a lot of money.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers.

But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is avoidable if you put in the effort, not to diet, but to be healthy.

Because she is constantly around tech geeks and herself works online, blogger Darya Rose, who is both my friend and the wife of Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose, is acutely aware of this pain and has a solution: Foodist, a way to stay healthy without going crazy dieting.

Reading her book a couple of weeks ago, I came across a passage that struck me as truth. In “Instagram, A Parable,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described a breaking point in his work/life balance as he tried to build the company. If you’re shoving down burritos in between database sharding, you probably can relate:

“We never ate healthy at the release,” recalled Systrom. “At least in the beginning, we’d be so into our work that crafting a salad out of arugula and radicchio just wasn’t going to happen midday.” Instead, they’d opt for the local food trucks or burritos near the office. Without their even realizing it, weight started to creep on.

“We were looking at old pictures from Instagram, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you look so young,’ and I was like, ‘What does that mean? Do I have gray hair? That was like six months ago,’” Systrom explained. “After that I kept telling myself, ‘I’ve got to get healthy again.”

Systrom had gained 25 pounds between Instagram’s launch in October of 2010 and its first 10 million users. “I bought a scale one day and realized my weight was up to 235,” he writes in Foodist. ”And I had never been this heavy in my life. I used to be 210, and I was like, ‘That’s not okay.’ But I knew I was not going to pull a sorority girl and just eat salad, because I love food. I can eat less, but I’m not going to stop eating food I like just to lose weight. That would make me unhappy.”

How did he do it? Exercise, by waking up earlier, making sure healthy food options were available in the Instagram office, the buddy system and saving indulgences for the real deal. He also packed a gym bag before bed, like a true hacker of life. “I knew that if I didn’t pack my gym bag with the clothes I was going to wear the next day, I wouldn’t make it to the gym. I also needed to lay out my workout clothes. I’d wake up in the morning and just make myself a deal: ‘Listen Kevin, all you need to do is put on those clothes and you’ll wake up on the drive to work and you’ll be fine.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nokia is going big on the camera features in its new 925 and 928 Lumia devices, continuing on in its PureView legacy first introduced back when it was still making Symbian devices. Within that it is adding a few key apps to the device — Oggl from Hipstamatic, the slick video sharing app Vyclone and Cinemagraph — but there is still no sign of popular picture-taking and picture-sharing app Instagram.

“We hear the voices on Instagram,” Matt Rothschild, head of sales for Nokia in the Americas, said in an interview, indicating that the company is still working on a deal: “For now, we see great technology complementing Instagram; we are continuing to work on that.”

In fact, TechCrunch understands that Nokia and Microsoft have been working hard on closing an agreement but still there have been no dice. Both CEOs have visited the company, we understand, and have even offered to put up investment reaching into the millions of dollars to create the app. Many (although not all) see Instagram as a deal-breaker, holding back some from making the switch to Windows Phone as their next startphone platform. (This point can be argued against, of course: Android has been growing like crazy, but it only got Instagram around a year ago.) In any case, given how much of a song and dance Nokia is making about its camera features — with its own Smart Camera software leading the pack — you can see why Nokia was so keen on securing the Instagram deal, which also included waging its own viral campaign.

In the meantime, we are getting other things, led by Oggl. Launched only three days ago for iOS, Nokia has secured a partnership with Hipstamatic to put its new app — itself an attempt at a comeback after free Instagram and other apps have stolen Hipstamatic’s paid app lunch — on to its Lumia devices. Because of the existing relationship between Hipstamatic and Instagram, from last March (before Instagram was bought by Facebook), users will now be able to post pictures that they take via Oggl on to Instagram.

Nokia plans to take its Smart Camera software, which offers best shot, action shot and motion focus, to other Lumia devices in Q3 later this year. But unlike Nokia’s mapping technology Here, which is coming to many other platforms — this will be staying only on Lumia’s devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook added 17 new positions to its careers page this week, including a Manager of Public Policy for Instagram and a number of openings on the user operations, finance and sales teams.

New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

• Manager, Public Policy (Instagram) (Menlo Park)
• Financial Analyst, FP&A – HR (Menlo Park)
• International Payroll Lead (Dublin)
• Privacy Counsel (Washington)
• Data Product Manager (Menlo Park)
• IT Operations Lead (Menlo Park)
• Security Engineer (Menlo Park)
• HR Specialist (Austin)
• Data Center Facility Operations Engineering Manager (Altoona)
• Associate, Risk Ads (Hyderabad)
• Specialist, Risk Operations (Hyderabad) (Hyderabad)
• Analyst, User Operations, Site Integrity (Hyderabad)
• Team Lead, Product Operations (Menlo Park)
• Global Account Manager (Mexico City)
• Head of CPG (Sydney)
• Vertical Client Partner, Retail (London)
• Vertical Client Partner, Telco (London)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Chute, a startup that offers tools for collecting and displaying photos, has raised $7 million in Series A Funding.

The round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and US Venture Partners. Chute previously raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Freestyle.

The company allows publishers and other businesses to pull relevant photos from social networks or collect them directly from users, then display those images on their own websites and in real-world locations. It’s also experimenting with other photo collection methods, like allowing NBC News reporters to post photos of the presidential inauguration directly from a Chute mobile reporting app.

The larger vision, said co-founder Ranvir Gujral, is to build “a complete visual platform.” He said that whenever a company publishes visual content, Chute should be involved in some way: “That doesn’t have to mean we publish everything — it just means that we know about it.”

The first step in making that happen, Gujral said, is “growing our marketshare and awareness,” and indeed that’s one of the company’s main goals with the new funding. At the same time, he acknowledged that there’s work to be done on the product side too.

Chute is also making a product announcement today, unveiling Chute Ads, which allow companies to incorporate photos, whether from the brand itself or provided by users, into banner ads. This helps brands tie together their “paid, owned, and earned media,” Gujrat said.

“As a brand, if I’m putting time into creating great content and posting it to my Instagram and Pinterest, I want to put it into my own ad units instead of a static SWF file,” Gujrat said. “We want to kill the static SWF file.”

The first publisher to offer Chute Ads, which are scheduled to go live in June, is Condé Nast Traveler. In a press release, Craig Kostelic, Head of Digital Global Sales for Condé Nast Travel Network, argues that the ads “give advertisers the ability to also be publishers,” and that since they pull content in real-time, “audiences will never see the same ad twice.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When you’re spreading like wildfire, why douse the flames to make a few bucks? Facebook’s willingness to wait on advertising helped its site and mobile apps grow massive, and now it’s applying the same strategy to Instagram. Wall Street is clamoring for Facebook to earn back the $700+ million it spent buying the photo app, but Mark Zuckerberg refuses to trade tomorrow’s dollars for today’s dimes.

It took Facebook years to get serious about ads. That’s because it was serious about growth and the user experience from day one. Facebook’s first ads were actually called “flyers” and promoted on-campus events. They fit right in rather than detracting from the value of the social network. When Facebook started selling to more traditional advertisers, the units it offered were tiny, and relegated to the sidebar so organic content could stay front and center. Compared to the loud flash banners and pop-ups found elsewhere, Facebook seemed like a sanctuary. The strategy helped it quickly grow to hundreds of millions of users.

Facebook launched its iPhone app in July 2008. For over three years, not a single ad was shown. The world was starting to go mobile, and Facebook wanted to welcome it with open arms, not greed. In 2010 and 2011, Facebook’s smartphone apps were growing at a stunning pace to become the most popular things on mobile. Clogging them with ads could have stunted growth when it had the most momentum.

By the end of 2011, both Facebook for iOS and Android had over 57 million daily users, and almost twice as many monthly users. There was no guilt in telling a friend to go download the apps. They weren’t necessarily the fastest thanks to their reliance on HTML5, but they didn’t waste limited real estate on squeezing money out of advertisers.

It wasn’t until early 2012 that Facebook finally announced it would start showing ads on mobile and the desktop news feed. By then an overwhelming percentage of people in the developed world were already using its site and smartphone apps. User growth in its most important markets like the US, UK, and Canada had slowed to a trickle. Growth was predominantly coming from the developing world where people use Facebook’s feature phone apps.

When it finally started showing ads on the web feed, iOS, and Android, Facebook had a lot less to lose. It didn’t need its apps to be as viral and add as many users in the first-world any more. It just needed to make sure not to drive people away from them. Ads started appearing, slowly at first as Facebook gauged reactions, and faster as it saw people weren’t browsing the feed significantly less because there were a few ads in the middle.

Long story long, the strategy has worked. Facebook could surely have an extra billion in the bank if it monetized earlier. But it might have sacrificed millions of users and positive connotation to get that money. Still, it’s been a bit of a surprise that a year after acquiring Instagram, Facebook said on this week’s earnings call that there’s no plan yet to show ads on the photo app. That’s not for lack of demand, Zuckerberg said:

“Instagram, they’re really doing well and growing really quickly, and I think that that is the right focus for them. And they have this opportunity to capture and basically build off this huge community and I think that that should be 100% of the focus right now. I am really optimistic about the business opportunity there, too. You already have a lot of brand from folks who advertise with Facebook putting content into Instagram, getting huge engagement rates. So people are coming to us and asking for ways to make that even richer and it’s something that we’re thinking about. But right now, I think that – I’m just really proud of the team and excited about how quickly they’re growing. They’re growing a lot faster now and were faster to get to 100 million than Facebook even.”

Perhaps when Facebook’s given Instagram enough time to grow, and it figures out how it wants to the advertising experience to work, we’ll see it monetize the acquisition. It has plenty of options for how.

Instagram could show glossy photo brand ads in the feed, but might try to avoid forcing users to click out to a browser to follow the ads. That’s why I’d expect Instagram to start with ads that help businesses get more followers and keep users bouncing around the app.

Businesses might pay to get the photos they post to their accounts showed to people who don’t currently follow them. A social version of these follow ads might target friends of or people who follow people who follow a brand. Yes, that’s a mouthful. Another option would be allowing brands to amplify the reach of user posts that tag them using Instagram’s new photo tagging feature. If I tagged Nike in a photo of my shoes, Nike might pay to show that post at the top of my friends’ feeds or show it again a week after I originally posted it in hopes of attracting more followers.

Instagram could also try Suggested Accounts that ask people to follow certain brands similar to Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad unit. App install ads which let developers pay to get their apps shown in the feed and downloaded have become Facebook’s new darling, so they could make their way to Instagram too.

Facebook and Instagram can afford this growth > ads strategy because its thinking long-term. Not long-term like Google with its moonshots, but Facebook is confident they’ll be dominant in their fields for at least a few years. Their large userbases and network effects luckily afford them a bit of a moat. It’s still a gamble, though. There’s always the risk that by the time Instagram starts advertising, something new in the media capture space will be stealing the attention of its users. It’s a tightrope to walk, but one that leads to a healthy community, quality experience, and a sustainable business model.

[Image Credits: Metrowest, MacStories]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You’ve likely heard whispers of a company called Wander in the past year. They nabbed $1.2 million, launched out of TechStars, and have since gone relatively quiet.

Until today.

Today Wander is launching a mobile app called Days, which aims to change the way you think of photo-sharing on every basic level.

To start, Days asks you to stop thinking of the moments that are “share-worthy.” On Days, every moment is share-worthy, because the idea is to share the normal, everyday routine of your life. The idea is that people can consume your whole day through photos, as opposed to picking up on little snippets throughout the day.

So as you go through the world snapping photos, Days automatically documents the time and puts them into the “Tuesday” gallery, or whatever day it might be.

Days also isn’t about taking beautiful pictures. It’s about taking a lot of them.

See, founder Jeremy Fisher believes there’s a huge disconnect between the best moments of people’s days and their Instagram feeds. He also feels that it takes far too long to share a single moment when you’re worried about making it visually appealing, as filters and captions pull you out of the moment.

On Days, you aren’t supposed to worry about how beautiful the picture is, but rather that you’ve documented as much of your day as possible.

But here’s the real zinger — nothing on Days is shared in real time. I know, right? Mind. Blown.

“I think people thought real-time was going to be a bigger deal than it actually is,” says Jeremy Fisher of most social and sharing services. “For things like friend-finders it’s a different story, but when you’re photo-sharing, real-time doesn’t actually make a difference.”

In fact, Wander studied Instagram photos tagged with #latergram (signifying that they were shared after the time they were taken) and found that these photos have the same level of engagement from other users as photos shared in the moment. For this reason, Days shows you a countdown clock within the app to the time you can share your day, starting at 5am each morning to ensure that party-goers late night photos don’t show up in the beginning of their Day.

Fisher explained that their beta testers don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that they’re catching up with their friends a day later. In fact, he said sometimes seeing someone’s daily story through pictures feels more real and meaningful than any narrative they might tell you when you ask the classic question: “How was your day?”

To keep your picture-snapping quick, and keep users in the moment, Days has implemented some restrictions.

One is that you must snap the pictures within the app, as you cannot import from the camera roll. The reason for this is that Days doesn’t want photoshopped, filtered, or edited photos on the service. They want you to feel like a photojournalist capturing each of the minute, but powerful, moments of your day.

Photos taken within Days are still saved to your camera roll, so you can share them through other social networks later if you feel the need.

Wander also picked up on the fact that users normally snap more than one picture of a certain event. This is to ensure you have multiple options for each instance.

But Wander doesn’t want you filling up your day with a bunch of throwaways and then having to go back and edit them out. So, to solve this problem, Wander turns all photos taken within ten seconds of each other into a gif. You have the option to go in and split the gif, delete one or two pics, or leave it the same.

Users can also add captions to all their photos after the fact, and go through and delete photos that they don’t want included in their Day. After that, you can share within the internal follow-model network, or push to your other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

But what about Wander?

Well, Wander is the umbrella brand behind a lot of lifestyle products the company is working on. Since Wander is focused on travel, and recording your experiences to be lived by others, Days has been released as a counterpart to that.

The app is available now in the App Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BeTheDancer is Alex Greenburg’s name and handle on Instagram. He’s a good friend and a brilliant photographer, but because Instagram doesn’t require real names, I had a lot trouble using the app’s new tagging feature to point him out in my photos. Right now, Instagram’s 100 million users are discovering that while pseudoanonymity can be fun, it’s not always  functional.

On Facebook, you’re told to use your real name, and most do. That makes it very easy to search for and friend people. Mark Zuckerberg knew the social graph depended on you being you, and saw how Myspace’s lack of real name policy made it a haven for impersonators and unaccountability.

When Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger started Instagram, it wasn’t meant to be your meatspace social graph or the online copy of your personality. It was just for smartphonetography. You entered your handle and your “name”. Neither had to be your real name.

Some people still use their birth name or a shortening of it as their username. I’m joshsc, for example. And many do put in their actual first and last name. But many others don’t add their real name and just go by a pseudoanonymous handle. Thanks to Facebook’s Find Friends feature it hasn’t been so hard to follow them, though.

But today Instagram launched photo tagging, where you have to tap someone’s real name or handle into a typeahead to say they’re in an image. That gets a lot tougher if they don’t have their real name attached to their account. I didn’t think to search for Be The Dancer when I wanted to tag my buddy Alex in a portrait I shot of him a year ago.

Over the next few days, Instagram users are going to be annoyed inundated with frequent notifications that they’ve been tagged in photos. But I’d bet those who go solely by pseudonyms will get a lot less. Tacking true identity onto a two-plus year-old social network doesn’t come easy. It could even steal a bit of the carefree atmosphere that’s made Instagram such a refreshing alternative to Facebook.

But one thing photo tagging will certainly do is strengthen Instagram’s social graph. After going to name a few friends in my photos, I realized I wasn’t following many of them. I opened the Facebook Find Friends feature and found hundreds of chums had joined Instagram since I last checked. I followed a ton of them, because Instagram isn’t just about photos anymore. It’s about the photographers, and the subjects who inspire them.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Instagram today announced a new way for users to tag their friends and other accounts, along with “Photos of You,” a new section of the profile that displays all the photos a user or brand has been tagged in.

The feature is similar to Facebook’s own photo tagging, where users can tap an area of a photo to add a person’s name. The person will be alerted and have the option to approve the photo before it goes on their profile. Previously, users could mention other users in the caption of their photos, but there was no way to clearly indicate who was in a photo and where. There also wasn’t a way to quickly access all the photos users themselves were in.

One difference from Facebook is that users can easily tag brand accounts. Facebook allows tagging of pages from desktop but never brought the feature to mobile, a missed opportunity since so many photos are uploaded from mobile devices. Instagram, with hashtags and now photo tagging, is closer to Twitter in being a platform for connecting with public figures, brands and people that users don’t know in person. Facebook on the other hand has struggled on this front in large part because there isn’t an easy way to tag non-friends or to notify those brands and public figures that they’ve been mentioned. Instagram’s all-private or all-public approach to privacy, like Twitter has, means it doesn’t have to deal with the same subtleties that Facebook does when it comes to these settings.

At the same time, the change today helps Instagram serve as a more complete social profile for people and brands, not unlike their profiles and pages on Facebook. Users can access photos of themselves or another account by tapping the button on the profile page, as seen below. This is available in the lastest iOS and Android versions of the app, though not on the web profile yet.

It’s worth noting that brands may have to begin putting time toward approving photo tags in order to manage their presence on the platform. Facebook says all users will have until May 16th to test the feature before their “Photos of You” section is visible to others.

Today Instagram launches photo tagging, the feature that fueled Facebook’s early growth. New Instagram iOS and Android updates rolling out now let you tag any person or brand in your own photos, which then automatically show up in the “Photos Of You” section of their profile. You get notified when you when you’re tagged, can require approvals before photos hit your profile, and have the option to detag yourself.

[Note that if you're not seeing version 3.5 of Instagram when you go to download the updates, you may have to wait a few minutes for your cluster of the App Store or Google Play to populate with the new version.]

Instagram tells me a year of work went into building the new tagging and Photos Of You section. Until now, people just @mentioned each other in the comments of photos as a hack. However, this didn’t make them much easier to keep track of, you couldn’t say exactly who’s who, and they weren’t hosted together anywhere. The new features are designed to help you more vividly capture moments, build a collection of photos you’re in, and create a curated photo history of yourself on your profile. The Photos Of You section of each person’s profile will remain unpublished until May 16th, giving you time to select whether you want to allow open tagging by any Instagram user, or prefer to pick and choose which appear on you profile.

Photo tag notifications could boost engagement and return visits to Instagram. Photos Of You gives people and brands a new way to curate their Instagram presence, and businesses can show off user-taken photos of them. The data about who tags who and who you’re tagged with could help Instagram provide a more personalized experience or power new forms of discovery. And perhaps one day, businesses might pay to more prominently show photos you’ve taken of them to your followers.

Clicking through reams of tagged photos of friends is an incredibly popular and engaging activity on Facebook. By giving Instagram its own version way to encourage these deep dives into someone’s life, it’s taking the focus off of real-time and opening putting its goldmine of older content on display.

That’s the gist of the new features, and there’s a video showing them off, but now let’s look closer at how they work.

How To Use Instagram Photo Tags

Once you’ve got the latest version 3.5 of your iOS or Android Instagram app, you’ll be able to go to your profile and check out your Photos Of You section. You can select free tagging so every shot tagged with you shows up there, or pre-approvals so you have to approve them before they appear. People who don’t get tagged often will probably be okay with automatic additions to their profile, but brands and celebrities that get tagged often may want to choose pre-approvals so they can offer a manicured presence on Instagram. Instagram has more privacy tips available in its Help Center.

Once you’ve made your decision, and skimmed through any photos of you that have been tagged since the new feature launched today, you can publish your Photos Of You section, similar to how Facebook gave people a curation period to scan their Timeline. On May 16th, whether you’ve published it or not, you Photos Of You Section will begin appearing in your profile.

When you go to upload a photo, you’ll get the option to tap on people or brands they show. You can then search for their name and tag them. Instagram also lets you go back and add tags to your old photos. You can tag anyone, not just people you follow, who follow you, or are your Facebook friends, but you can only add tags to your own photos, not anyone else’s.

Facebook sees the uploader as the story-teller. People will tag their friends, celebrities they spot, or brands that appear in their photos. Brands meanwhile might tag associated businesses or public figures. For example, the San Francisco 49ers might tag individual players in its photos.

When people browse their feed, they’ll be able to tap a photo to reveal who or what’s tagged in it. By hiding the tags by default, the sanctity of your phone-tography is preserved. If you get tagged in a photo you’re allowed to see (any public photo or private photo of someone you’ve been allowed to follow), you’ll get a notification. You’ll get the option to remove or not approve the photo if you don’t want it on your profile, detag it if you don’t want to be associated with it, or report it if it’s a serious problem.

The Future’s In The Photo Graph

Each time you get notified that you’ve been tagged, you’re likely to immediately go check out the photo on Instagram. It’s this same viral reengagement technique that helped Facebook grow so quickly in its early days. Instagram already has over 100 million users, but this could get them spending more time with the app. It also might draw in new users who want to be able to see where they’ve been tagged.

Instagram tells me it hasn’t thought too much about the long-term monetization or data use implications of the features, but they’re sure to help it. Knowing who you get tagged with or who you tag could let it eventually serve you more relevant ads. Tags of brands could power a Sponsored Stories that amplify your word-of-mouth mention of them to more of your friends. Perhaps Instagram could pin these Sponsored Tags at the top of your followers’ feeds, or show them multiple times. Businesses might buy these ads to get more followers themselves. Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday on Facebook’s earnings call that there’s still no immediate plans to put ads on Instagram. That makes sense, as Facebook wouldn’t want to knee-cap growth when Instagram is still adding so many users per month.

As most people can attest, pretty photos of sunsets and latte art are nice, but it’s photos of people that are truly engaging. That’s why these changes could supercharge Instagram, and make it more than just today’s photo feed. With Photo Map and now Photos Of You, Instagram is becoming your photo life.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch