Instagram Reverts To Original Ad Terms After Outcry, Says It Needs To Figure Out Ad Program First

Following the controversy over recently-unveiled changes to its terms of service, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom just announced via blog post that the advertising-related section of the TOS has reverted to “the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010.”

The Facebook-owned photo service had already hinted that this was coming, with Systrom saying that the team was listening to user concerns and that there would be changes to the TOS to make it clear that “it is not our intention to sell your photos.”

That doesn’t mean Instagram won’t ever make ever make advertising-related changes to its TOS. Instead, Systrom says that the company needs to figure out the details of its advertising program first:

Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.

Systrom also apologizes outright, though to he attributes the outcry to bad communication on the company’s part, rather than any real malicious intent. (In fact, TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff and Josh Constine discussed the communication issue yesterday.) Here’s the apology:

In the days since [the updated terms unveiled], it became clear that we failed to fulfill what I consider one of our most important responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly. I am sorry for that, and I am focused on making it right.

The concerns we heard about from you the most focused on advertising, and what our changes might mean for you and your photos. There was confusion and real concern about what our possible advertising products could look like and how they would work.

You can check out the updated terms of service here.

For more on this issue, read Josh’s piece on the lessons learned from Instagram’s ad policy fiasco.

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...

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A Hackathon Ushers In A Holiday Version Of Changemakrs, The Platform For Inspirational Quotes

Changemakrs, a platform for sharing inspiration built by an ex-Facebooker, is tapping into the Christmas spirit with a version of the site that lets anyone share holiday quotes.

If you sign into the site, Changemakrs will automatically add holiday quotes to the homepage, using some natural-language processing algorithms that categorize the quotes. They also do quality filtering through internal user rankings. This holiday version of the site was hacked together in a few hours. The site has picked up holiday quotes from Bon Jovi, the movies “Miracle on 34th Street,” and “Elf,” and Charles Dickens.

Changemakrs is a platform where anyone can post and share inspirational quotes. It was born out of some experimentation by a former Facebook business development manager Sacha Tueni and his co-founder Mathias Wagner. After working on a Twitter client (yes, a Twitter client) for a couple of months, they built a tribute site to Steve Jobs that overlaid his best advice on top of stark, black-and-white photos of him.

The barebones site quickly went viral, accumulating 3 million pageviews in about 48 hours. They then repeated that approach with many other famous figures like Albert Einstein and Lady Gaga, with similar results.

They then turned it into an open site where anyone could share or accumulate bits and pieces of aspirational wisdom. The site came out of beta earlier this month. Yes, it is a bit of a brain-dead, simple concept, and strangely, web-focused in a mobile-first world. But the team says that while there are plenty of quote sites across the web, these competitors are outdated with Craigslist-era design. Plus, they’re not designed to be particularly social or viral.

Tueni, who used to work at Facebook, has been involved in social change-oriented projects before. Before he joined Facebook, he built a mobile service that let Lebanese voters report election irregularities with their feature phones. Changemakrs is currently bootstrapped for now.

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Lessons Learned From Instagram’s Ad Policy Fiasco

Instagram’s back-and-forth on its advertising policy is a case study in tech PR blundering. It demonstrates the need for clear explanations of terms of services changes. It also raises the question of whether apps should update their terms to cover future monetization strategies as early as they know what these money-makers look like, or if they should notify users right before the ads go live.

When Instagram changed its ad terms this week, co-founder Kevin Systrom admitted its mistake was that it confused everyone. And as I’ve written, you always fear what you don’t understand.

Two years in, it was time for Instagram to step up plans for monetization. But it used vague and omnious legalese to update its terms and say it could be paid to use people’s likeness, photos, and actions for promotions. Users jumped to the the worst possible interpretation, panicked, and forced the company to apologize and revert the advertising terms to the old version.

That was a massive exercise in burning Instagram’s social capital. It had had a pretty good run without security or privacy problems. Even through the Facebook acquisition, people remained hopeful the company would keep its hands clean. In just a few days, millions of people lost trust in Instagram. Some completely, exporting their photos and deleting their accounts, most just stopped seeing it as different than the stereotypical money-hungry corporation.

Needless to say, Instagram could have handled this whole situation better, and others startups would do well to avoid this mess. If there’s one big takeaway from the who debacle, it’s that web services have to make sure not to confuse their users with terms of service updates, or people will assume the worst. But a smooth terms of service change takes careful timing too.

Maybe the answer is right from the beginning. Startups, just like Instagram, often launch with terms that say users may see ads. Nowadays they should probably include that users may be ads. But if done too vaguely, this could deter growth, or cause PR problems too early when a service doesn’t have users locked in yet.

You could say that was the case here. Instagram has great market and mindshare right now, but it’s also just been joined in the photo sharing space by several competitors. Twitter now has filters, Flickr launched its own app, and now Google has Snapseed. Plus people were already a little riled up about Facebook integrating data with Instagram and the governance vote being eliminated.

It wasn’t the best time for Instagram to give users a scare.

More importantly, though, it wasn’t ready. Instagram’s vague language was surely in part because it doesn’t exactly know what it wants to do with ads. The more specific the plans, the more clear a company can make its terms, the less users have to misinterpret, and the less outcry there will probably be. Some will say as soon as possible, but if you do it too soon there’s no way you can do so clearly.

But there’s a flip side. A company doesn’t want to wait until just before the ads themselves start showing up, because they don’t want to give users tangible evidence to latch their anger onto. That’s probably what Instagram was shooting for. It hoped to slide these new ad terms in, and later subtly start showing ads without much of a stir.

Now with the old ad terms in place, Instagram is going to go meditate on how its advertising business will work. We’ll see if that eventual TOS change can hit the sweet spot between when people forget about this week’s fiasco, and when we finally see how tomorrow’s camera makes money.

[Image via Getty]

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A Whisper Is A Stronger Social Signal Than A Public Shout

Yesterday was a surprisingly interesting news day, given how close we are to celebrating the holidays. Facebook struck while the iron was hot and released a brand new standalone iOS app called “Poke”, leveraging a feature that has been around since the early days of the product, as well as a shot across the bow of Snapchat, who it reportedly attempted to acquire.

At first glance, it’s a competitive move, and also a whimsical one. The idea of sending someone a message that self-destructs is kind of “cute”, in the way that passing notes in class was when you were younger. But make no mistake about it, Facebook’s Poke is meant as a means to strengthen its social graph, as well as to crib signals from your daily lives and activities to make itself a better company. I’m not saying that anything is wrong with that, but these are the obvious facts.

Let’s discuss the idea of a social signal first, though. When you tweet something, and someone responds, that’s a signal that the person is interested in what you have to say. One could also infer that this person “likes” you, or has an affinity for you or what you just said. This could all be torn down as bullshit though, since we all know that sometimes we respond to people to simply get their attention.

The Facebook Poke is an interesting historical feature, one that hasn’t really been documented. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s baby, as Facebook was and is, but not much is known about it, only assumed. During yesterday’s ferver about this new Poke app, a phrase was repeated by outlets over and over again, here’s one from CNN:

The poke, which is still around but rarely used, is a minimalistic form of communication — the digital equivalent of a head nod or wink.

I take issue with the notion that it’s “rarely used”, because we simply do not have data to back that statement or sentiment up, Facebook has never made it public. I would challenge that it’s not public data because it’s quite important. Whispering to someone is way more interesting than speaking to ten people in a crowd.

When you’re at a bar and you look around at the people there, are you interested in what a group of fifteen people are talking about, or what the two folks in the corner are speaking about directly? You could infer that they’re having an intimate conversation, perhaps a closely connected moment. If it’s a guy and a girl, you might wonder if they’re dating, married or are about to “hook up”. The group of fifteen, however, are simply blowing off steam and having a good time. But for a company like Facebook, the connection in the corner is more valuable to them as a company, and you as a user.

Facebook has attempted to help you connect to the people who matter most by automatically and algorithmically creating a “Closest Friends” group on the service. This is probably based on a number of factors, although none of us who aren’t working at Facebook are sure. It’s probably a mix of how often you message them directly, how often you comment or like their status updates, how often you message them directly or even how often you visit their profile. All of the actions are “data points” and “social signals” to Facebook. All of this data then gets analyzed by people and algorithms to try and display the best experience possible for you on Facebook.

When I say that Facebook is trying to make it a better experience for you, I mean that it wants you to stay there and never leave. That should be the goal for every company with a social product. When you see content on your News Feed that is interesting, and you feel the need and want to engage, that’s a huge score for Facebook and eventually it’s advertisers.

Spending more time on Facebook, be it on the desktop or on mobile, is always the goal. You don’t go to a restaurant that you hate and spend a lot of money there, do you? Of course not. Great restaurants figure out a way to make you feel at home, more comfortable, call you by your first name all in the hopes that you’ll return and tell your friends to come too. It’s just good business.

Facebook is a business, don’t forget that. As is Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, Instagram, Yahoo! and every other company that you use products from, for free.

People get up in arms when business and social interconnect. Why? Well, showing us ads on Facebook is like being a part of that fifteen person conversation in a bar, and then a Coca-Cola rep jumping in the middle and saying “Hey! Becky loves Coke, you should too! BYE!” Sounds obnoxious, doesn’t it? But that’s business, it happens every single day. There are Bud-Light signs in bars to attract you to the product, it’s just how it works.

What Facebook is doing with Poke is trying to figure out who you interact with privately the most. If they know that, then they know what ads will work better on you. If I Poke Josh Constine a lot, then they know that an ad with his face or content on it might just work on me. That’s pretty smart. It also creeps some people out. Get used to it, though, it’s the present and the future.

Your whispers, while they aren’t technically being “read, watched or listened to” are being tracked as serious social signals. That’s why the app exists, it’s not because Zuckerberg was bored and wanted to code, don’t think that for a second.

Google doesn’t “read” your email, just like Facebook won’t “look at” your Pokes. They don’t have time for that, they don’t care, and well, it’s illegal. But what these companies are doing is watching how you use their services so that they can tune them better to fit yours, and everyone else’s, needs.

This is how Facebook is going to attract the rest of the world’s population that aren’t using Facebook. It needs your data to survive. If you’re not OK with that, you have a choice to not use it. You can leave the Internet entirely. But what you can’t do is complain about it over and over. It’s life, it’s business and you are the product. Period.

While Facebook does feel like it has, and will continue to, change the world, it is a company with business models and now shareholders. The same goes for Google. Don’t be a cynic and think that Facebook or Google is evil. They’re not, they’re people just like you. But do go in with your eyes wide open.

Your whisper is more valuable than a public shout, say a comment on someone’s public status update about how cute their dog or child is. You could be commenting on the update to remind them that you’re there, or to show off in front of others. Facebook can’t know that. Nobody can.

But know this, Facebook is interested in your conversation, winks, hugs and kisses with that guy or girl in the bar, way back in the corner by the jukebox. Especially if you’re in a demographic that it doesn’t have a hold on. Like, younger crowds that Snapchat has the attention of.

*Poke*

[Photo credit: Flickr and Flickr]

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Facebook Makes Big Last-Minute Holiday Drive To Sell Gifts With Banners Atop The Web And Mobile Feeds

Touting its ability to notify someone immediately that you bought them a present, Facebook is showing large banners atop the web and mobile news feed telling people to buy Gifts. Facebook hopes tardy shoppers will purchase through its e-commerce arm because presents bought elsewhere wouldn’t arrive before Christmas. Facebook’s won’t either but at least friends would know they have a gift on the way.

Facebook debuted Gifts in September to give people an easy way to buy a wide variety of presents for friends on special occasions like their birthdays, engagements, or graduations. It’s since rolled out Gifts to all U.S. users who have been starting to see these banners over the weekend.

Gifts uses data on who you’re closest to and what a recipient likes to make intelligent suggestions for who you should give to and what you give them. Gifts range from physical goods like flowers, chocolate, and stuffed animals to digital gifts like Starbucks, iTunes, and Uber credits. Digital Gifts are delivered immediately, which makes them great last-minute presents.

Until now, the Gift buying flow usually started with you choosing a specific person and clicking through the Gift icon on an alert about their birthday on the Facebook.com homepage or at the top of the mobile news feed.

This holiday push is different. It first tries to get you to decide to buy Gifts at all. If you click the “Get Started” button on the “Send A Last-Minute Gift” banners appearing at the top of the small and big screen news feeds, you’re shown a smart list of your closest friends. These are the people you talk with and are tagged with most and therefore are most likely to want to buy gifts for.

From there you can choose a Gift, write a personal message, pay (or pay later), and have your Gift sent. That means your friend sees a “wrapped” version of it on their wall instantly. It works well for last-minute holiday shoppers because there’s evidence that you bought someone a Gift right away, even if physical gifts take a few days to come via snail mail and don’t arrive until after Christmas. Facebook warns you Gifts will be delivered after December 25th, so you don’t think it will overnight your presents.

By using its unique data set to match you with people to give to and what to give them, Facebook has a chance to usurp ecommerce sites like Amazon. A lot of people are happy to spend money on Gifts, but its the shopping process that deters them. Facebook’s suggestions take the decision-making out of Gift giving, so it feels like a quick and casual transaction rather than something you labor over. The holidays are stressful enough after all.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Facebook Poke Vs. Snapchat: What’s The Difference?

Today, Facebook launched a new mobile app called Poke. It’s strikingly similar to a new photo-sharing app that’s taken the blogosphere by storm, called Snapchat.

Both Snapchat and Poke let you send pictures or videos which are then destroyed within a matter of seconds.

But the social network has officially launched its competitor, and the differences are few but important.

The biggest difference between Snapchat and Poke may come down to Terms Of Service, which is fitting with the Instagram conversation still burning.

It’s unclear whether or not Poke keeps the images on Facebook’s servers or not. We’ve reached out to Facebook and are waiting to see what Facebook puts on the now-empty Poke support page.

If it’s in keeping with the Facebook Terms Of Service, Facebook likely gets to hold on to that content for a period of time before it’s deleted. This is what Facebook’s TOS says about your content when it’s destroyed:

When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

The social network may have to develop some new language for this app, as opposed to having all of Facebook’s products fall under the same terms of service. In fact, Josh Constine has learned that Facebook may actually be completely deleting photos from its servers or is at least making them completely inaccessible to users and employees. We’ll wait for confirmation on that.

Update: Facebook has clarified it’s terms of service for Poke:

All Poke messages are stored in encrypted form and retained for two days after the last recipient views the poke — a process that helps facilitate abuse reporting. After that period, a Poke’s encryption key is deleted. However, it may still be possible to recover that key from logs or backups. After a fixed time period, this key becomes inaccessible, rendering the content completely unreadable (unless it was copied for abuse reporting.) Today, that fixed period can be up to 90 days, but we are working to significantly reduce that period over the next several weeks as we verify the stability of the Poke deletion system.

Snapchat’s method is to delete the image from its servers as soon as the recipient has seen it.

A second, and important, difference is the way Snapchat and Poke connect you to friends.

Snapchat uses Facebook to find friends, and obviously Poke does the same, so Poke has a leg up in terms of auto-integration. Still, Snapchat may help you actually find more friends with the app, as you can search by phone number or user name to add friends.

It’s also worth considering Snapchat’s username customization. The app has a loyal base of users with chosen screen names. That could be one of the bigger differences between Snapchat and Facebook Poke.

When you download Poke on a mobile device, you instantly log in with your Facebook Profile, relegating you to the name you use on Facebook and the friends you have there.

Though I don’t believe in the slightest that Snapchat is used primarily for sexting, I do think that there may be some users who enjoy snapping with randos (as evidenced by Twitter) that would like to keep their anonymous user name.

Poke also has two extra forms of interaction: text-only messages and “pokes.”

Both let you overlay text onto photos, and both let you draw over photos in a selection of colors (if we’re getting picky, Snapchat has more color options for drawing).

After you’ve taken your picture (or video) and added your text and artwork, both apps let you set a limit on how long the content will be viewable to the recipient. On Poke, the second limit is a choice between 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds, whereas Snapchat lets you choose anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds.

The actual feature differences are slight, but it’ll be interesting to watch this space take off now that Facebook has thrown its hat in the ring.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Snapchat is the fastest way to share a moment with friends. You control how long your friends can view your message – simply set the timer up to ten seconds and send. They’ll have that long to view your message and then it disappears forever. We’ll let you know if they take a screenshot! Build relationships, collect points, and view your best friends. Snapchat is instantly fun and insanely playful. Show your friends how clever you can be and enjoy the lightness of...

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Instagram Courts Future Advertisers By Letting Facebook Brand Page Owners Share Straight To Fans

Instagram pushed some app updates for iOS and Android yesterday, but it delayed a blog post about them until this morning to give the company’s apology for terms of service shenanigans more time at the top of the site. A post describing the updates came this morning, and it highlights that its Android app now lets Facebook Page admins connect their accounts and share Instagrams directly to fans.

Most of what else was added in the updates to Instagram for iOS and Android was hashed over yesterday, including support for 25 additional languages, a new Mayfair filter, uploads from non-camera roll albums, and fixes to a bug with its privacy policy toggle.

The ability to share to a Facebook Page is fascinating, though, as it will encourage brands to create accounts on Instagram. That could lay the groundwork for turning these brands into advertisers once Instagram figures out how it wants its ad business to look.

If it wasn’t obvious enough, brands should probably start looking to hire top Instagram-takers to prep for the next age of social advertising that focuses on photos. Subtly turning product photos into marketing content without being overbearing is no easy feat. A brand’s best bet might be recruiting people who’ve acquired millions of followers by mastering the art and science of what resonates on Instagram.

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Facebook Launches Snapchat Competitor “Poke”, An iOS App For Sending Expiring Text, Photos, And Videos

Facebook has just announced its newest standalone app called “Poke” which lets people send photos, videos, pokes, or text Facebook messages to their friends that expire after a few seconds. The launch confirms AllThingsD’s report from earlier this month. Poke is a big move into the ephemeral messaging space for Facebook, and it could give it even more data on who your closest friends are.

Facebook was convinced it needed an expiring messages app. Snapchat’s iOS and Android apps were gaining serious traction with young users. Over 50 million photos are getting shared on Snapchat each day for a total of 1 billion traded on the service compared to Facebook’s 300 million photos shared a day. Clearly there was something magical about self-destructing media.

Seems that Facebook didn’t want to wait for Snapchat to get so big it’d have to make another costly acquisition like Instagram and instead decided to compete early. We heard rumors that it had made overtures about acquiring Snapchat, but when the founders decided to stay independent, Facebook built its own version in just 12 days. Why would Facebook’s Blake Ross share that fact? Beacause it’s that kind of tenacity and lack of red tape that attracts great talent to come work at Facebook. It’s also a signal to startups about just how fast Facebook can steamroll them.

The Poke app brings the classic contentless message into the mobile media-sharing age, but it’s actually a completely separate feature. Facebook explains that the app is designed to let you contact friends from wherever you are and show them what you’re doing. Here’s how the announcement describes how the app works:

“With the Poke app, you can poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what you’re up to in a lightweight way. You can poke an individual friend or several at once. Each message expires after a specific time you’ve set, either 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds. When time runs out, the message disappears from the app. “

Essentially you pick a type of message to send — either a poke, text, photo, or video — and choose a friend or multiple friends to send it to. You can then set the expiration timer, add a location, overlay text or draw on a photo, and then send it. Recipients get a push notification with a little voice saying “Poke!”, open the Poke app, see your name and what type of message you sent, and then hold down on the message thread to view the content until the timer runs out and the message disappears.

The app is all mobile and completely separate from Facebook’s other apps and desktop site. If you Poke someone on Facebook.com by going to their profile, they won’t get that Poke in the App, and nothing you do in the app can be seen outside of it. There’s currently no way to view Poke app messages on the web.

For now the Poke app is iOS only, but you can expect a release for Android soon as Snapchat is already there. Poke was built in under two weeks by a small team led Facebook’s veteran Director of Product Blake Ross, so there’s probably a lot of development still left to get it where Facebook wants it to be. There’s a chance that self-destructing media could make its way into Facebook’s main app, as the company has said that power users of its standalone apps like Camera and Messenger are guinea pigs for features it’s considering for the flagship apps.

As for privacy, Poke simply links back to the main Facebook terms of service, which would imply Facebook can save all the content from the app until you delete your account. However, a Facebook spokesperson tells me “All Poke messages are retained for two days after being read, to help facilitate abuse reporting.” After that their encryption keys are deleted making unreadable. The statement references the fact that users can flag messages as inappropriate if they’re getting nude or otherwise alarming Pokes. Facebook also gives paranoid Pokers have the option to clear their inbox so any unread messages are instantly destroyed.

Poke is pretty unabashed clone of Snapchat. Both apps let you draw and overlay text on photos before you send the little timebombs. They also notify the person you’re chatting with if you take a screenshot of what they sent you. For a quick reference, check out this chart comparing the features of the two apps.

Poke adds some useful extras. It offers simple text messages, in addition to video and photos. You can add a location to where you record a Poke message. Also, in Poke you can have group conversations, whereas on Snapchat you can message multiple people at once but not keep them all in a thread.

One thing Poke does lack is the ability to message people in your phone book, not just Facebook friends. In terms of design, Poke’s biggest flaw right now is a slight delay from when you hold on a message to when the content appears and the timer starts ticking. This caused me to lift my finger to try tapping again, canceling the previous view. Snapchat’s quickness is highly revered by its users, and Facebook will have make Poke more responsive, but otherwise the app feels well crafted.

Poke is a big problem for Snapchat, which is unfortunate for the small, scrappy team out of Stanford. GigaOm reported Snapchat is in the middle of closing a big round of funding led by Benchmark Capital, and our sources indicate it’s raising over $10 million at a $70 million valuation. That value might fluctuate with Poke’s release. It certainly validates the space, but only by bringing an 800-pound blue gorilla into it. It seems Snapchat CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel see this as confirming his company is working on something important, as his response to the launch of Poke was “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.”

Poke has some big advantages it will bring to the fight with Snapchat, most specifically in distribution. Facebook does some nifty things to onboard people. If someone else uses the Poke app to send you a message, but you haven’t installed Poke yet, you’ll get a push notification from you main Facebook app asking you to download Poke. Facebook also routinely cross-promotes its standalone apps with banners at the top of its primary apps. For example, a download button for Poke at the top of Facebook for iOS which has around 125 million users could drive tons of installs.

The question now is whether users will be comfortable sharing on Poke. Snapchat’s outsider status gave it some street cred, especially amongst teenagers who view Facebook as a tool of the generation before them. After Facebook’s privacy troubles over the years, some people don’t fully trust it.

If Snapchat actually was mainly a sexting app, it’d probably be fine despite Poke because people would be scared to intermingle racy photos with their widely accessible Facebook presence.. But it’s not all about sexting. Snapchat is mostly for sharing goofy photos that months or years later might seem inane but at the time are hilarious. Using Poke for a few minutes I already get the feeling it can handle this silly and addicting use case well. I’ve already gotten a few laughs out of it.

Poke could successfully slow the growth of Snapchat and deter others from entering the space, which would keep more sharing in the Facebook ecosystem. Inevitably the question is how Facebook will make money on Poke. Right now there’s no ads. One day there might be, but its launch seems more focused on creating something fun for users while boxing out a potential disruptor. Mark Zuckerberg pulled the rug out from under Myspace, and he doesn’t want anyone doing the same to him.

Even if it doesn’t earn money directly, Poke is very important to Facebook. The people you send ephemeral messages to are often your closest friends. Facebook needs to know this intimate social graph to be able to tune its news feed and other parts of the service to show you the most relevant content. Because really, if you send someone a photo of you with a purple mustaches drawn on top, you probably want to see what they’re sharing with everyone else.

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You can download Poke from the App Store here.

And there’s a cute little Easter Egg in it. If you drag your messages list all the way up, you’ll see the text “I’ll find something to put here”. This is the same text Mark Zuckerberg left in the bottom of the Facebook.com footer in the early days of the site.

Read more of our Snapchat-Poke coverage:

Facebook Poke Vs. Snapchat: What’s The Difference?

Snapchat Co-Founder Evan Spiegel Responds To Poke: “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.”

Your Facebook Pokes Are Stored For Two Days, Then Their Encryption Keys Are Deleted

Facebook And Snapchat Go Toe To Toe: Why It’s Good For Both Companies

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Path Starts Looking Like The Best Place To Store Your Social Data, Thanks To Its New Search Feature

With its latest update, Path is adding an important new feature — the ability to search through all of your content, as well as your friends’ content.

Co-founder and CEO Dave Morin told me yesterday that even though he’s described Path as a journaling app in the past (when Path unveiled its big revamp last year, he said it was a for users to “capture all the experiences” on their path through life). “The one thing that we haven’t really enabled is a way for us to go back and search through that journal in a way that’s really powerful and really easy.” That’s something Morin said he’s been planning from the very start, and today it’s available to users.

The idea of adding a search feature may not seem all that innovative or unique, until you think about how hard it is to find old content on the big social networks — to the extent that companies like Timehop and Memolane have built services specifically to unearth your old updates.

With Path search, you can now find all the updates in your network that are tied to a certain friend, place, time of year, birthday, or emotion. So for example, when Morin demonstrated the app, he was able to bring up all the updates that he made a year ago (looks like he was doing a lot of skiing), or narrow the search even further by looking at all the updates he made a year ago with his wife Brit.

What’s particularly powerful about Path’s search feature is the fact that the app has access to metadata that wasn’t directly entered by the user. Morin did a search for skiing, bringing up many updates whose captions explicitly mentioned skiing, but also a number of others where skiing didn’t come up in the text at all. Path could extrapolate that they were ski-related because of the location. He also did a search for “sunset” and again, Path made an educated guess at which photos included sunsets based on the time (as a result, there were a few non-sunset photos mixed in, but not enough to be annoying).

There’s also the ability to specifically search for “Nearby” updates. This might be particularly useful when you’re traveling, so you can see the places visited and photos shared by your friends when they were in the same neighborhood or city — creating, in Morin’s words, “an asynchronous shared experience.”

The search engine seems to allow for some pretty sophisticated searches — Morin was able to find his “first photo with Amy [Swanson, who does PR for Path].” That kind of searching can take a while to learn, but Path has already created a friendly on-boarding process. When you first select the search feature, Path gives you a big list of suggested searches and search types, giving you a sense of what’s possible. And if you’re not sure what to search for, you can just choose something from the list.

I bet the new search feature will encourage me to post to Path more often. I’m actually weirdly dogmatic about minimizing my cross-posting between social networks, so I often ask myself, “Okay, what should I post to Path versus Instagram versus Facebook?” Now that I know that content I upload to Path will be just a search away a few months or a year from now, I’m more inclined to treat the app as the default place to post my content, with cross-posting elsewhere as appropriate. I know there are people who already treat Path that way, but again, making old content more discoverable should encourage that behavior.

Morin also disclosed that Path has now reached 5 million registered users.

Path is the simple and private way to share life with close friends & family. Founded by Dave Morin, previously Co-Inventor of Platform and Connect at Facebook with Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster, and Dustin Mierau co-creator of Macster.

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Dave is an entrepreneur. Today, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Path, the personal network that helps you be closer with the ones you love. Previously, was an early member of the Facebook team where he spent several years working to make the Internet more social by co-creating Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Prior to Facebook, he spent several years learning design thinking and marketing while working at Apple. Dave received a degree in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dave...

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Airbnb Gets More International And Interactive: Adds 18 Languages, Reviews And Calendar Access In New App Update

Taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people will be travelling during the next week and a half — and assuming that at least some of them are not organized enough to have booked their accommodation yet — Airbnb today released a new version of its iOS mobile app with some significant updates. To better target weary travellers and innkeepers this holiday season and beyond, Airbnb is adding support for 18 more languages; the ability to add reviews; and calendar access.

All the updates bring the iOS app further in line with the company’s website, and pave the way for Airbnb adding in more interactive features in the future — possibly making use of its recent acquisition of Localmind, which allows users to post questions about specific locations that then get answered by local experts.

The enhanced features also point to how popular the iOS app is already, and to how Airbnb wants to capitalize on that. The company tells me that the iOS app has already had 1.8 million downloads to date, with an 80% increase over the past three months.

Some 26% of Airbnb’s overall traffic at the moment comes from mobile devices (compared to only 12% at this time last year), and it’s clearly a central part of how the company hopes to entice more people to list properties and book them: it says that at the moment the response time for messages sent between hosts and guest is three times faster when the Airbnb mobile apps are used — that’s across iOS, mobile web and Android combined.

But if you’re an Android user looking for similar upgrades, you’re out of luck for now. Airbnb will not give a date for when it will be extending these updates to the Android platform: “We are always working on ways to improve our overall mobile experience, but we don’t have an Android update to share at this time,” a spokesperson noted in an email.

The 18 new languages — including Malay, Turkish and Chinese — now bring the total number supported by the app up to 27. They are a sign of how the company continues to ramp up its international profile, not an insignificant effort because of the various clones — two European competitors for example are 9Flats and the Rocket Internet-backed Wimdu — that are emerging to meet demand. There is still some way to go in getting a fully-international operation up and running. Airbnb says that the 200,000 properties on its books now range across 30,000 cities in 192 countries.

Adding in the ability to read and write reviews, meanwhile, seems like table stakes and to be honest, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long to incorporate them, especially since they’ve proved fairly central to the company’s business model: “Reviews are foundational to creating trust on Airbnb and we’ve seen these become increasingly important to driving repeat traffic to hosts,” the company says.

The Calendar addition, lastly, is really a move to improve Airbnb’s dialog with hosts. The idea here is that hosts will now be able to check and update availability for a property directly from their mobile devices, which will make it easier for them to post and list days on the service.

We’ve contacted Airbnb for some details on how well they’ve fared to date with mobile app usage, and whether they can give us any indication of when they plan to update on other platforms — like Android. [Update: answers incorporated into text above!]

Founded in August 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world – online or from a mobile phone. Whether an apartment for a night, a castle for a week, or a villa for month, Airbnb connects people to unique travel experiences, at any price point, in more that 26,000 cities and 192 countries. And with world-class customer service and a growing community...

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Meet Facebook’s Stealth Marketing Platform, “Publishing Garage”

One of Facebook’s bigger hurdles in advertising has been to figure out ways of either applying traditional metrics, or coming up with new ones, to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns on the social network. Today, we got wind of one of its latest efforts to connect the dots a bit better. Publishing Garage is a new program — and platform — that the social network has created to work with mega-agencies and brands to improve how brands use Facebook to market themselves, and measure when it’s working well.

The existence of Publishing Garage was first spotted by the blog Fusible, which noticed that Facebook had registered a number of domain names — variations on publishinggarage.com, facebookpublishinggarage.com, and so on.

Fusible also notes that there have been some other hints for it elsewhere: an online search for “Facebook Publishing Garage” takes you to the site of Addie Marino, a brand specialist and creative strategist for Facebook in New York. One of the projects detailed on her site is for logo and design work for Publishing Garage, which she describes as a “program geared at building world-class social publishing systems that enable brands to create the most meaningful connections with their connections and their friends through News Feed stories.” Part of Publishing Garage involves intensive three-day workshops, she says.

I have done some digging and found out a bit more: The Publishing Garage program has actually been quietly running since September. There have been 20 Publishing Garages so far in the U.S. with major brands — but the names are not being made public (one possible candidate: Macy’s). Now Facebook is expanding the program to other markets, starting with the UK. Tomorrow, Facebook is expected to reveal that the first brand to use the platform/program internationally is Doritos, working with its agencies AMV BBDO and OMD, to create its own, optimised publishing system.

The idea is to help court big brands who are already spending a lot, to keep spending that money by ensuring that what they are doing is actually working… and possibly spend more. “Publishing Garage is a Facebook-led initiative for brands to optimise their performance on Facebook, an ignition switch to make the participating brand one of the best publishers on Facebook,” notes a news release on the program.

I believe the agencies involved will change depending on the brand/client; the description seems to imply a strong role played by OMD and AMV at least in the Doritos campaign specifically: “Managed via a cross-agency, client and Facebook steering committee, it incorporates AMV’s and Facebook’s expertise in publishing content with OMD’s skill in understanding audiences and setting creative roles for media.”

Although Facebook has registered about eight different variations on that domain name, it looks like at this point there are no plans to make this a public website — rather, it will remain open only to those brands working on Publishing Garage projects with Facebook. As I understand it, for now it will only be open to brands that are spending above a certain threshold on Facebook marketing.

In addition to offering up a team of creative strategists from Facebook itself (the ‘intensive workshops’) Publishing Garage is aiming to put into place a set of measurements to demonstrate how well campaigns are working. This will be in collaboration with Nielsen as well as other social measurement tools — although which are not yet specified.

Work on the Doritos campaign has been going on since November and the aim is to “optimise the Doritos Facebook content strategy, complimented by longer-term media support.  The media investment will amplify key strategic posts and increase awareness of Doritos content at key moments,” the company says.

It’s not clear whether Facebook at some point intends this to replace the functions of third parties like Vitrue, Nanigans or others who provide marketing expertise, insight and platforms for brands that want to advertise on Facebook, but it’s one more sign of how the social network is getting increasingly sophisticated in its bid to court big ad dollars.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Facebook’s Status Box Gets More Personal, Asks You “What’s Going On?” By Name

Here’s something quite interesting coming from Facebook on a day when it launched its SnapChat competitor, “Poke.” It seems like the company is testing out a design that is a bit more…personal.

We’re familiar with the prompts within the status box when we log into Facebook and sit on our news feed. Today, I noticed something different. It asked me, by name, what was going on. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, but these are the types of design and user experience tests that we see in the wild all of the time.

This might be an interesting technique to get people to share more. Seeing it was like getting a call from someone and them saying “Hi, Drew” rather than “May I speak to Mr. Olanoff?” That slight difference might increase the number of status messages that people share on a daily basis.

At least, that’s what Facebook is hoping, I’m sure. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment, and one that makes Facebook look a little more human, which is something that it’s been lacking of late. Sure, it’s a social network, but when your friends’ content is surrounded by ads all of the time, you tend to lose that personal touch.

Having said that, the more items that are shared, the more you’ll come back to the site and to more opportunities for Facebook ads.

Have you seen this on Facebook?

Update: A Facebook spokesperson told us: “This is something we’re testing … We’re testing different variations to see how people like them.”

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Weotta Improves Its Activity-Planning App With Time And Place Filters, Plus Facebook Integration

I was already pretty impressed with activity-recommenation startup Weotta, but the app got a lot better with its latest update.

It still includes the core Weotta experience — bringing up a “stack” of things you can can do right now, near your current location (at the moment, the app is recommending a bunch of lunch spots near my apartment). If there’s something you like, you can swipe down to save it. With everything else, you can swipe up or across to show that you’re not interested, and the next items in the stack will be tailored based on your interests (so if I keep rejecting lunch recommendations, the app should figure out that I’m not interested in food).

With the update, Weotta has gotten a new name (it was previously called Weotta Go) and a new design. More importantly, you can now use the app to plan activities in advance, thanks to new time and place filters. Combined with some of the filtering that Weotta already offered, it’s easy to tailor your search to a number of different situations — you just enter where, when, what, and who you’re planning for. In one case, you might want to look at things you can do in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood for a date tonight. In another, you could be planning for a bachelor party in Las Vegas this weekend. (The app works for dates up to 30 days ahead.)

There are other new features that should help with activity planning. For one thing, you no longer have to manually create a list of related activities. Instead, everything that you mark as interesting gets saved into a big super list, which you can then filter based on time and location. When CEO and co-founder Grant Wernick demonstrated the app for me, he highlighted a bunch of New York activities, then he automatically retrieved those activities by just selecting “New York” from the list of saved ideas. Plus, Weotta now integrates with Facebook, so you can see activities that your friends have saved and share lists with them over text, email, and Facebook.

Behind the scenes, Wernick said the app is pulling data from all over the web, using it to go beyond star ratings and make generalizations about the type of location it is and the kind of person/event it’s appropriate for. Weotta users can also enter their own reviews directly into the app. Those reviews are incorporated into a new feature called “awards,” where the app actually gives little badges to the best-reviewed spots in a number of categories, such as “top Basque restaurant.”

In some ways, the new app is a return to Weotta’s roots — when the company launched at our Disrupt conference last year, it offered a broad activity-planning website. The iPhone app that it launched more recently was focused on “right now.” The latest version seems like a nice middle ground between the two, with an app that makes it easy to find stuff to do right now, but also offers a simple interface to tweak your search and plan ahead.

Weotta now works in more than 40 cities. You can download it here.

Weotta cleans, classifies, and connects the real world around us, turning unstructured place and event data into contextually relevant results. Their deep ontology enables you to make requests like, “Give me a romantic Japanese restaurant”, “Tell me where to go on a classy date”, or “Where should I go after the game”. They were a TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2011 finalist. To showcase their capabilities at Disrupt they created the WeottaMakePlans itinerary generator. Recently, they launched the mobile...

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Your Facebook Pokes Are Stored For Two Days, Then Their Encryption Keys Are Deleted

Facebook Poke messages self-destruct after a few seconds, but is Facebook saving these potentially embarrassing photos and videos? No. It’s deleting them. Pokes are encrypted, and Facebook deletes the encryption keys two days after they’re read so they’re unreadable. Key backups are destroyed within 90 days, making a poke completely inaccessible. So send those silly, racy messages with confidence.

Normally, Facebook stores everything you share until you delete your account. This lets it mine your photos for location data, track what sites you share links to, and collect other information that can help it improve the site or better target its ads.

But ephemeral messages are different. They’re meant to be individual moments of time that aren’t saved. This makes them feel urgent and informal. That feeling can be ruined if you think those messages are being saved. There’s already a level of paranoia about Facebook and privacy.

Yesterday when Facebook launched its ephemeral messaging app Poke for iOS, I heard some people say they would stick with independent competitor Snapchat because they worried ”Mark Zuckerberg is going to see my Pokes.”

Snapchat, the app that inspired (or some say was cloned to create) Poke, set a precedent for ephemeral messaging privacy by stating in its terms that: “When you send or receive messages using the Snapchat services, we temporarily process and store your images and videos in order to provide our services… we attempt to delete image data as soon as possible after the message is transmitted.”

That gives users the peace of mind that they can Snapchat anything they want as long as they don’t offend the recipient.

As soon as Poke launched, I was curious about how Facebook would handle this especially private data and asked for its policy. Poke’s “Privacy and Legal” button sends people to Facebook’s standard terms of service, so it’s understandable that people would think it was saving their Pokes. Facebook isn’t, though, and this morning the company gave me the full explanation of how Poke data is protected:

All Poke messages are stored in encrypted form and retained for two days after the last recipient views the poke — a process that helps facilitate abuse reporting. After that period, a Poke’s encryption key is deleted. However, it may still be possible to recover that key from logs or backups. After a fixed time period, this key becomes inaccessible, rendering the content completely unreadable (unless it was copied for abuse reporting.) Today, that fixed period can be up to 90 days, but we are working to significantly reduce that period over the next several weeks as we verify the stability of the Poke deletion system.

So essentially, Facebook only stores your Pokes for two days so if anyone reports you for offending them, like by sending unwanted images of what’s in your pants, it can see if the accusations are true. Then it effectively deletes the Pokes, and by 90 days after there’s absolutely no way to recover the contents of a message. Facebook is trying to cut down that window, which could help it appear just as secure as Snapchat.

Ephemeral messaging is a very new space and the norms are still being sussed out. Facebook could have saved Pokes forever, or it could delete them immediately. Instead, by saving them briefly for abuse-reporting reasons, Facebook may have found the right balance between privacy and security.

For more on Facebook’s new Poke app, read:

Facebook Launches Snapchat Competitor “Poke”, An iOS App For Sending Expiring Text, Photos, And Videos

Facebook Poke Vs. Snapchat: What’s The Difference?

Snapchat Co-Founder Evan Spiegel Responds To Poke: “Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.”

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Tired Of Mean And Nasty YouTube Comments? The YuleTube Browser Extension Will Fix That

If you’ve ever gone “deep” into the nastiness that the YouTube commenting section can be, then you know that it’s not a pretty place. Depending on the type of content you’re visiting, fights will break out, mothers will be dragged into the conversation and it’s just not fun to be around. Who are we kidding? No matter what type of content it is, a YouTube commenter troll or 10 will say something nasty to start a feud.

Today, a tipster sent us a browser extension called YuleTube and it works on Safari, Chrome and Firefox. What it does is turn naughty comments into nice ones. With precision and hilarity. Sorry, Internet Explorer users, you’re fucked not included.

Once you install the extension, all of the filthy words that appear in comments will be replaced with Holiday-themed ones that are much nicer, and thus funnier.

I implore you to install this extension if you use YouTube. Happy Holidays.

YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles. YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...

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SocialSafe, The Social Media Back-Up Tool, Raises $400K To Out-Archive Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

SocialSafe, the social media back-up tool co-founded by Julian Ranger‘s iBundle and 1minus1, has announced that it’s raised £250,000 (~$400k) in what’s being called a Series A round. That’s because Ranger, who is a prominent angel investor in the UK, has already funded the startup to the tune of £300k, bringing the total raised by SocialSafe to £550k (~$885k).

Today’s round comes from Marco Sodi, plus other unnamed UK-based angels, and is said to be used to “fast-track” the technical development of the app to add new functionality such as analytics and support for more networks, including Pinterest.

SocialSafe is a Mac/Windows app built using Adobe Air, which lets users download and back up their content from social media accounts, with support for Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Viadeo. The resulting archive is then searchable or can be browsed via a handy calendar view.

Interestingly, however, unlike the likes of Backupify, SocialSafe shuns the cloud for the actual back-ups. Instead all data is stored locally on a user’s PC where, of course, it can still be manually pushed to the cloud using a complementary online back-up service. I’m told that this is in part because the Term of Service of most social networks and their associated developer APIs prohibit storing a full duplicate of their data in the cloud. It also ensures that SocialSafe never sees a user’s data, significantly strengthening its privacy card. In the future, however, the company plans to add third-party cloud storage support to make a DIY approach simpler.

As for why you’d use SocialSafe over Twitter’s own slowly rolling out back-up functionality, or Facebook and LinkedIn’s existing archive support, it’s fair to say that the app goes a lot deeper in terms of exactly what data is backed up and the way it makes it browsable. For example, Twitter only exports a user’s tweets, not their follow/follower graph, DMs, or mentions, all of which SocialSafe retrieves.

In the future, SocialSafe’s competitive advantage should also extend to what the startup is calling “smart visualisation of usage insights,” which presumably pushes the app towards social media professionals/companies, not just consumers. In fact, when I met up with Ranger recently, he did suggest that one use for an app like SocialSafe is for regulatory compliance, where in the UK, for example, companies can be required to keep a record of all official communication. And, yes, that could include tweets and Facebook Page updates.

SocialSafe is a simple, fun and effective tool that enables Facebook users to store and manage a copy of their Facebook data on their own computer. This includes photos, tagged photos, profile information, contact details, with additional data being included in future upgrades. SocialSafe offers a simple, fun and effective solution for Facebook users. It allows them to download their photos, including any that they have been tagged in, see snapshots of friends found & lost over time and safeguard...

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Founded by Julian Ranger, an angel investor since 2007 and an entrepreneur since he formed his first business STASYS, in 1989, iBundle is an innovation hub for software and web companies, providing innovative new tools and services for their target markets. Julian grew STASYS to a A£17m+ business with 230 staff with subsidiaries in the US, Australia and Germany before selling it to Lockheed Martin in 2005. Julian has made several angel investments in diverse business such as Astrobotic (robots...

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Backupify is the leading backup provider for cloud based data, offering an all-in-one archiving, search and restore solution for the most popular online services including Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. With one account you get centralized access to all of your information, stored securely, easily searchable, and ready for restoration or transfer at a moment’s notice.

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Inside Snapchat, The Little Photo-Sharing App That Launched A Sexting Scare

It started with an assumption, really. Snapchat, a photo-sharing application that auto-destroys images seconds after being opened, launched in September 2011 with zero media coverage. A homegrown product, built by two Stanford guys, grew to now see over 50 million snaps per day today. In fact, Facebook launched a clone of the app just Friday.

It wasn’t until the company made its first milestone announcement, nine months after launch, that the media picked up the story. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton whipped out all this cute PEW research on sexting in adults and teens, and referenced “suggestive” marketing materials and even pointed out the app’s “mild sexual content or nudity” warning.

From that moment on, whether in milestone achievements, feature and expansion announcements, or stories about Facebook’s new Snapchat clone, Snapchat was branded a sexting app.

Snapchat is a lot like Pinterest. Coverage of the service came way later than its troves of users.

Being late, and of a different generation than the majority of the app’s users, many members of the media jumped on the click-happy sexting story instead of the truth.

“We were worried that usage and growth would decrease if the sexting publicity made Snapchatters feel uncomfortable,” said co-founder Evan Spiegel. “In hindsight we shouldn’t have underestimated the loyalty and creativity of our community. The uptake has been remarkable.”

And it has been. Snapchat is currently sending over 50 million snaps per day, with over 1 billion sent in total. Plus, word on the street is that Snapchat is raising a round of funding between $8 and $10 million. And up until this Friday, there were also rumors that Facebook was launching a clone, and it did.

Snapchat suddenly became a huge deal, and the urge to understand it (and explain its success) became important. And in the mind of tech reporters, the blogosphere, and the general media, there’s only one explanation for using an app that sends and then destroys self-portraits: sexting.

And the app’s marketing materials and app user warning didn’t help. The original screenshots on display in the App Store were of pretty girls in bikinis. The app warned of “Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity.”

“To be fair, our early marketing materials were a bit amateurish. I took those photos on the beach with friends,” said Spiegel. “They were fun and playful at the time, but didn’t represent how the app was actually being used.”

Whatever Spiegel’s intentions, the media ran with the sexting story. After all, in a media that loves turning a sclerotic eye on made-up teenage perversity (“rainbow parties,” “jenkem”), Snapchat was solid gold.

Best of all, this Snap-sex trend was lining up with the evidence. There was even a Tumblr site called Snapchat Sluts documenting one man’s sexting rampage.

The confusion is understandable, given the nature of the app and its self-destructing pictures. The media are a generation of tech users that are incredibly obsessed with privacy. We would make this logical leap in the wake of Anthony Weiner and every teenage girl who’s ended up with a nude pic on the internet.

In any case, story after story popped up about Snapchat, all of which mentioned it’s popularity among sexting teens.

Turns out, almost every reporter to use both the words Snapchat and sexting in an article is a user on Snapchat. I know this because Buzzfeed discovered Snapchat has public user profiles on the internet, showing users top three most frequently snapped-with friends and their Snapchat score (a count of Snaps sent and received on the platform).

These writers fall into two categories: real users who are active on the platform (which is clear from their scores), and users who downloaded the app , used it once or twice to better understand it, and then wrote a story on it.

I learned that the former group is predominantly chatting with each other. For example, Katie Notopolous of BuzzFeed, who wrote this story about Snapchat’s super risky public profiles, chats with Gawker’s Max Read (who wrote this) and with a Gizmodo writer Sam Biddle. Sam snaps occasionally with less active user Joel Johnson, longtime Gizmodo employee.

Then there’s the folks who’ve written about Snapchat being the sexting app, but barely ever use it, like Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert (story), GigaOm’s Eliza Kern (story), CNET’s Jason Parker (story), and the NYT’s Nick Bilton (story). Yep, the same guy who started the myth doesn’t even use the app.

There are two conclusions we can make. The first is that the same folks who serve you a round of tech news with your morning coffee and bagel are also in a Snapchat sexting ring. The second option is that the very same people who have repeatedly assumed that Snapchat is for sexting, and propagated that myth, don’t use Snapchat for sexting at all.

Weird, huh?

“Social media has generally relied on surveillance as the mechanism for stimulating feelings of connectedness,” Spiegel explained. “We’ve found that using Snapchat to live and share in the moment can make you feel like you’re face-to-face with a friend even if they’re on another continent.”

Truth is, there can never be any evidence that Snapchat is used primarily for sexting because the service deletes photos immediately after they’re opened, both from the recipient’s phone and from their servers. This means that there can not be any real evidence for or against sexting on Snapchat.

And you know what? By a very small percentage of users, Snapchat probably is used for sexting for a very small percentage of the time.

When you’re sending over 50 million snaps a day, a few of them are bound to be of naughty bits. But 80 percent of those snaps are sent during the day, with a spike during school hours. Whatever the sexting stats may be, they’re more likely using Snapchat to cheat on tests than to sext.

Snapchat wasn’t built for sexting, which seems clear from the fact that pictures self-destruct in less time than it takes to fully enjoy a nude pic. But some see this as a security feature for sexting, which is a matter of opinion.

However, the UI (which is actually quite amateur) doesn’t really suggest “Let’s Get It On,” with lots of yellow and bubbly blue and a friendly ghost for a mascot. Valid, but still an opinion, and one which opponents can argue is meant to lure young demographics to the sexting platform. Let’s, instead, focus on the evidence.

The user warning on the app, referenced in many Snapchat articles, means nothing. Every photo sharing app has one like it. Check out Instagram’s.

Also often referenced, the “suggestive” marketing images (which have since been swapped for new ones) were a mistake, but not one worth crucifying the app for.

And let’s not forget that Facebook just cloned this app with Poke. Is Facebook really trying to tap into teen sexting? Probably not. They’re tapping into something much bigger than that.

There is a big difference between the way a 24-year-old and a 19-year-old see social networking. It seems like a small gap, but some crucial changes happened during this time that has most certainly differentiated today’s teenager from yesterday’s.

The first was the release of the iPhone in 2007, which changed photo-sharing as we know it. People take photos of anything and everything now, because their camera is in their pocket, and uploading those photos to the internet takes three clicks, tops.

The second crucial change was the public opening of Facebook in 2006.

My sister is 19 and I am 24. I was 19 when the iPhone came out, and I was a senior in high school when I first got Facebook, a year before it launched publicly.

My sister was 14 when the iPhone came out, first got on Facebook at age 13. Unlike myself, her friends have had smartphones (and have been taking pictures with them) throughout their entire high school (and now college) career. And many of them are now documented neatly on her Timeline.

The pressure to maintain an appropriate, attractive presence on the Internet has weighed on me since college. It’s been with her for her entire life.

This is the difference between the people writing about Snapchat and the people using it.

My sister is one of the biggest Snapchat users I know, and the pictures she sends me of herself are awful. That’s not the usual for her. She’s 19, and will force our family to stand in 100-degree weather for hours to get the perfect shot of her smile.

The snaps she sends me could be called ugly — her on the porch, in the dark, with a goofy look on her face. If she was posting this on Facebook, or Instagram, or even sending it to me on MMS, it wouldn’t be the same picture. It wouldn’t be so ugly.

But there’s an intimacy that comes with Snapchat that makes those pictures safe, and much more enjoyable than seeing yet another perfect picture of my sister on Facebook. I see her as she really is.

It’s about as real as you can get in a world where everything happens through an all-seeing eye of 1?s and 0?s.

Snapchat is the fastest way to share a moment with friends. You control how long your friends can view your message – simply set the timer up to ten seconds and send. They’ll have that long to view your message and then it disappears forever. We’ll let you know if they take a screenshot! Build relationships, collect points, and view your best friends. Snapchat is instantly fun and insanely playful. Show your friends how clever you can be and enjoy the lightness of...

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