Bits Blog: Instagram Will Begin Showing Ads in the Photo Stream

Bits: YouTube’s Founders Challenge Vine and Instagram With New Video App

Digital Diary: Instagram Video and the Death of Fantasy

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Instagram Reversal Doesn’t Appease Everyone

Ryan Cox, a 29-year-old management consultant at ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based interactive marketing software company, said he had already moved his photos to Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing app, where he could have better control.

Mr. Cox said the uproar this week over whether Instagram owned its users’ photos was “a wake-up call.”

“It’s my fault,” he continued. “I’m smart enough to know what Instagram had and what they could do — especially the minute Facebook acquired them — but I was a victim of naïve optimism.”

“Naïve optimism” is as good a term as any for the emotion that people feel as they put their private lives onto social networks.

Companies like Google, Twitter, Yelp and Facebook offer themselves as free services for users to store and share their most intimate pictures, secrets, messages and memories. But to flourish over the long term, they need to seek new ways to market the personal data they accumulate. They must constantly push the envelope, hoping users either do not notice or do not care.

So they sell ads against the content of an e-mail, as Google does, or transform a user’s likes into commercial endorsements, as Facebook does, or sell photographs of your adorable 3-year-old, which is what Instagram was accused of planning this week.

“The reality is that companies have always had to make money,” said Miriam H. Wugmeister, chair of Morrison Foerster’s privacy and data security group.

Even as Instagram was pulling back on its changed terms of service on Thursday night, it made clear it was only regrouping. After all, Facebook, as a publicly held corporation, must answer to Wall Street’s quarterly expectations.

“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,” Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s youthful co-founder, wrote on the company’s blog.

Instagram’s actions angered many users who were already incensed over the company’s decision earlier this month to cut off its integration with Twitter, a Facebook rival, making it harder for its users to share their Instagram photos on Twitter.

Users were apprehensive that the new terms of service meant that data on their favorite things would be shared with Facebook and its advertisers. Users also worried that their photos would become advertising.

Instagram is barely two years old but has 100 million users. Last spring, Facebook announced plans to buy it in a deal that was initially valued at $1 billion. The deal was closed in September for a somewhat smaller amount.

For some users, Mr. Systrom’s apology and declaration that “Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did” was sufficient.

National Geographic, which suspended its account in the middle of the uproar, held a conference call with members of Facebook’s legal and policy teams. Afterward, the magazine, which has 658,000 Instagram followers, said it would resurrect its account.

Also mollified was Noah Kalina, who took wedding photographs earlier this year for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. In a widely circulated post on Twitter, Mr. Kalina said the new terms of service were “a contract no professional or nonprofessional should ever sign.” His advice: “Walk away.”

On Friday, the photographer said he had walked back. “It’s nice to know they listened.”

Kim Kardashian, the most followed person on Instagram, said on Tuesday that she “really loved” the service — note the past tense — and that the new rules were not “fair.” She had yet to update her 17 million Twitter followers on Friday, but since she is pushing her True Reflection fragrance it is a safe bet that she has forgiven and forgotten.

Bits Blog: Instagram Does an About-Face

Eric Piermont/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder and chief executive.

11:14 p.m. | Updated
SAN FRANCISCO — In the aftermath of the uproar over changes to Instagram’s privacy policy and terms of service earlier this week, the company did an about-face late Thursday.

In a blog post on the company’s site, Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder, said that where advertising was concerned, the company would revert to its previous terms of service, which have been in effect since October 2010.

“Rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed,” he wrote, “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.” Users had been particularly concerned by a clause in Instagram’s policy introduced on Monday that suggested Instagram would share users’ data — like their favorite places, bands, restaurants and hobbies — with Facebook and its advertisers to better target ads.

They also took issue with an update to the company’s terms of service that suggested users’ photos could be used in advertisements, without compensation and even without their knowledge.

The terms of that user agreement said, “You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your user name, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata) and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

Following a reaction that included customers defecting to other services, Mr. Systrom told Instagram users on Tuesday that the new policy had been misinterpreted. “It is our mistake that this language is confusing,” he wrote, and he promised an updated agreement.

That statement apparently was not enough. With more people leaving the service, the company, which Facebook bought for $735 million this year, reacted again by returning to the old rules.

Acknowledging those concerns late Thursday, Mr. Systrom wrote: “I want to be really clear: Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos — you do.”

Mr. Systrom said the company would still be tweaking its privacy policy to quell users’ fears that their photos might pop-up on third-party sites without their consent.

But Mr. Systrom did not clarify how Instagram planned to monetize its service in the future. Facebook is under pressure to make Instagram earn income.

“It’s a free service — they have to monetize somewhere,” said John Casasanta, a principal at Tap Tap Tap, the maker of Camera+, a photo-filter app that has shunned advertising and instead charges users for premium features. “The days of the simple banner ads are gone. Their user data is too valuable.”

It was unclear whether reverting its terms of service would be enough to satisfy high-profile users like National Geographic, which stopped using its Instagram account in light of the moves, or other users who have aired their grievances on Twitter and Facebook.

The controversy has driven traffic and new users to several other photo-sharing applications.

Pheed, an Instagram-like app that gives users the option to monetize their own content by charging followers to see their posts, gained more users than any other app in the United States on Thursday. By Thursday morning, Pheed had jumped to the ninth most downloaded social-networking app in Apple’s iTunes store, just ahead of LinkedIn.

O. D. Kobo, Pheed’s chief executive, said Thursday morning that subscriptions to the service had quadrupled this week and that in the last 24 hours users had uploaded 300,000 new files to the service — more uploads than any other 24-hour-period since Pheed made its debut six weeks ago.

Another runaway success was Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing service, which redesigned its app last week to make it easier to share photos on Twitter. In a stroke of good fortune, it released the app to positive reviews just as Instagram announced it would no longer sync with Twitter, a Facebook rival.

The day before Instagram announced changes to its terms of service, Flickr’s mobile app was ranked at around 175 in Apple’s overall iTunes app charts. Since that day, the application skyrocketed to the high 20s.

Of course, most of these services are still tiny compared to Instagram, which claims to have more than 100 million members who have uploaded upward of 5 billion photos using its service. And it was unclear if the services’ newfound members had also deleted their Instagram accounts or were merely dabbling in other offerings. But the migration, whether temporary or permanent, was a reminder of the volatility of success and that the fall to bottom can sometimes be as swift as the rise to the top.

Facebook and Instagram declined to say whether they had seen any significant number of account deletions or if they were concerned about losing ground in the photo-sharing market to rivals. Some photo apps took direct aim at Instagram. Camera+ even went so far as to include a snide, holiday-themed reference to Instagram’s stumbles in an app update on Wednesday.

“We’ll never do shady things with your shared pics, because it just isn’t right,” the update noted. “On that note, happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Bits Blog: Anger at Changes on Instagram

Karly Domb Sadof/Associated Press

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service, was met with anger after changing its terms of service on Monday. The changes will let advertisers in Facebook’s ad network use data and information that users have shared on Instagram, and will also give Instagram and Facebook the right to use its users’ photographs and identity in advertisements. The changes are to go into effect Jan. 16.

On Twitter, many users said they were deleting their accounts and urged others to do the same.

Disruptions: Disruptions: Instagram Testimony Doesn't Add Up

Eric Piermont/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive.

On a late August morning, Kevin Systrom, chief executive of Instagram, took an oath before testifying at a hearing of the California Corporations Department, which sought to determine if Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing service was in the best interest of Instagram investors. Facebook requested the hearing as a way to speed up the approval of its acquisition.

When asked if his company had received any offers besides Facebook’s at the time of the negotiations, Mr. Systrom said, “No, we never received any offers,” according to transcripts of the hearings. He said Instagram had “talked to other parties, but never received any formal offers from anybody else.”

Ivan V. Griswold, a lawyer for the state regulators, asked again: “Immediately before the negotiations, did you receive any offers from invest — .” Before he could finish his question, the transcripts show, Mr. Systrom cut him off.

“We never received any formal offers or term sheets,” Mr. Systrom said. “No.”

Yet the accounts of several people close to Twitter and Facebook, and documents reviewed by The New York Times, contradict the statements he made under oath. Mr. Systrom and Mike Krieger, the other founder of Instagram, held several meetings as late as March with top Twitter executives, according to people on both sides of the talks, who requested anonymity because the talks were private and because they were concerned about legal repercussions. These people said the sides had verbally agreed weeks earlier on a price for Instagram of $525 million in cash and Twitter shares.

Mr. Systrom told Twitter on March 20 that he and Mr. Krieger had thought about the offer and had decided to “remain independent.” Less than three weeks later, Twitter found out, along with the rest of the world, that Instagram had agreed to be acquired by Facebook in a $1 billion deal negotiated personally by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. The deal included $300 million in cash and the rest was in Facebook stock. Instagram was privately owned by its founders, Mr. Systrom and Mr. Krieger, who had a majority stake in the company, and several venture capital funds.

The people familiar with the negotiations said Twitter executives were shocked that they had not been given an opportunity to present a counteroffer. They said Twitter was prepared to make higher offers.

Facebook and Mr. Systrom declined to comment about the statements made to regulators or the talks with Twitter. Gabriel Stricker, a Twitter spokesman, also declined to comment.

Although it might seem unimportant whether wealthy investors made a few million dollars less than they could have, those investors often represent funds that include workers’ pensions and mutual funds. The case could also be seen as another example of a large tech company’s sidestepping regulators.

Statements made by other people involved in the Instagram deal don’t add up, either. When Facebook submitted its applications to California regulators, its general counsel, Ted Ullyot, wrote that although the board had considered possible alternatives, there was a “lack of interest in acquiring the company expressed by other potential acquirers of the company.” Through a spokesman, Facebook declined to comment.

Mark Leyes, director of communications for the Corporations Department, said the department — which is to protect consumers and investors from self-dealing in transactions — had “not received any complaints or protests of our original fairness hearing proceedings in the Facebook/Instagram acquisition.”

In general, said Eric Talley, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “if there is sworn testimony, there are perjury risks.” Also, he added, “there are fraud risks in which an inaccurate statement to your investors could violate antifraud laws at both the state or federal level.”

Dr. Talley said there were many reasons people might try to hide information from investors, including “deal sweeteners,” in which someone might be allowed to remain head of a company or be given more cash.

Mr. Systrom, who previously worked on mergers and acquisitions at Google, was careful about his interactions with Twitter from the start. He asked to meet in restaurants around San Francisco, rather than in either company’s office, according to people briefed on the talks. When he was handed the term sheet by a Twitter employee, a nonbinding document outlining the terms of a proposed acquisition, he read it and then handed it back, asking Twitter executives to hold onto it over the weekend as he weighed the details, those people said.

It is possible investors would have been better off selling in an open auction, to Twitter or even to Google or Microsoft.

The deal with Facebook closed at $735 million in early September, after Facebook’s stock plunged because of investors’ fears that its revenue growth prospects were weak. Given that the privately traded Twitter is expected to make $1 billion in revenue next year, which would increase its valuation considerably, Instagram investors might have made millions of more dollars.

It is unclear why Facebook didn’t mention Twitter’s interest. A clue might be found in the company’s amended S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlining details of the Instagram acquisition: Dr. Talley said it used language often reserved for antitrust cases.

The wording in the updated S-1 filing, which included a termination fee of 20 percent if the deal fell through, “suggests that there really was some concern about antitrust clearance from the F.T.C.,” Dr. Talley said, referring to the Federal Trade Commission. “These antitrust questions would not have been raised if Instagram was selling to Twitter or Google.”

An F.T.C. spokesman, Mitchell J. Katz, declined to comment.

There also is the issue of what Mr. Systrom and regulators consider a “formal offer.” Although lawyers make differing arguments, Mr. Systrom was asked by regulators on several occasions if he had received other offers, formal or otherwise, and each time he said no.

Facebook has tangled with regulators before. What it does with its customers’ data attracted the attention of the F.T.C., which accused it last year of “unfair and deceptive” practices. The agency’s settlement with the company required Facebook to submit to privacy audits for 20 years.

Facebook has also sparred with the S.E.C. over its depiction of its mobile strategy in its filing to go public.

At the end of the hearing, regulators asked Mr. Systrom a third time about other offers: if there had been “any other inquiries from third parties about a possible acquisition of Instagram” after the Facebook deal was announced. Although Twitter executives had since tried to contact Mr. Systrom, he replied, “I and the board have not received any.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Facebook Responds to Anger Over Proposed Instagram Changes

Jeremy Pinnix, a 40-year-old app developer in Spring Hill, Tenn., has been a regular user of the photo-sharing service Instagram since it was introduced in 2010, posting pictures of his family, local scenery and favorite moments.

But when he learned this week about changes to the company’s terms of service that would apparently allow his photos to be used as advertisements, he didn’t hesitate. Mr. Pinnix deleted his account and has not looked back.

“Many of the photos I take are of my wife and kids,” he said. “The idea that those could be used in ads without my consent is disconcerting.”

This has been a common sentiment on social networks this week as Instagram users react to the coming changes, part of a push by Facebook, which now owns Instagram, to make money from the service.

On Tuesday evening, the complaints prompted some action. Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, wrote a blog post saying the company would change the new terms of service to make clearer what would happen to users’ pictures.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that many users are confused and upset about what the changes mean,” he wrote. “I’m writing this today to let you know we’re listening and to commit to you that we will be doing more to answer your questions, fix any mistakes, and eliminate the confusion.”

Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, said the latest skirmish between Facebook and its users was part of the sometimes uncomfortable dynamic between companies that offer free online services and their eventual need to turn a profit from them.

“The interest of the site is never 100 percent aligned with the users, and the divergence inevitably leads to friction,” said Mr. Goldman. “It’s unavoidable.”

When it announced the changes on Monday, Facebook provided few details on how it would integrate ads and photos, other than to say that when the changes went into effect on Jan. 16, they would not affect any photographs uploaded to the service before then.

That did not prevent unhappy users from threatening to take their portfolios of photographs over to rival services. Many, including Mr. Pinnix, eyed a return to Flickr, the former king of photo-sharing services, which is owned by Yahoo. In a stroke of lucky timing, Flickr recently released a shiny new application for the iPhone that has drawn praise from users.

The operators of services like Instaport.Me and Instabackup, which let people create copies of their Instagram photos, said they were seeing higher than average volume.

Linus Ekenstam, who helped found a service called Copygram that lets people back-up their Instagram accounts and order physical prints of their favorite snaps, said demand for the company’s free exporting tool had skyrocketed.

“It’s a thousand percent more activity than we’re used to,” he said. “Today is crazy.”

He estimated that roughly 15 people per minute were using the exporting tool, and around half a million photographs had been backed up.

On Instagram, a Thriving Bazaar Taps a Big Market

These entrepreneurs have realized that they can piggyback on the popularity of Instagram, which has more than 100 million users, and create their own businesses, some of which have turned out to be quite profitable. They join a long line of innovators who have found creative ways to build new services on top of existing sites and platforms.

Services like Printstagram, for example, let people turn their Instagram images into prints, wall calendars and stickers. A group of designers are building a digital picture frame for Instagram photos. Some early users of the service are leveraging their expertise and sizable followings and starting consulting agencies, advising big-name brands on how best to use Instagram themselves.

And others have simply realized that the app is a great place to post photos of things they are trying to sell. Jenn Nguyen, 26, who lives in Irvine, Calif., has 8,300 followers on Instagram, where she posts images of lavishly made-up women who are wearing her brand of false eyelashes.

“When we post a new picture of someone wearing our lashes, we instantly see sales,” she said.

Ms. Nguyen is part of a wave of entrepreneurial Instagrammers who have transformed their feeds into virtual shop windows, full of handmade jewelry, retro eyewear, high-end sneakers, cute baking accessories, vintage clothing and custom artwork.

Those who want to sell things on Instagram have to resort to surprisingly low-tech tactics. Instagram does not allow users to add links to their photo posts, so merchants have to list a phone number for placing orders, or hope their followers will type the Web address of their store into a browser.

Shoppers seem willing to put up with that hassle. Ms. Nguyen said that during a recent holiday sale, she offered Instagram followers a coupon for 35 percent off their orders. That day, she said, she netted 100 orders, about $4,000 in sales, up from her usual $500. In her photo captions she mentions her online store and highlights products that are new or soon to be sold out.

Most of the people taking this sales approach are small-scale entrepreneurs and artists, looking for another way to find customers for their consignment shops and jewelry businesses. Hundreds of larger companies and big-name brands have accounts on Instagram, but only a few have taken steps toward actually selling there. Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury retailer, has posted photographs of women’s shoes and jewelry alongside telephone numbers for the store.

Instagram is a compelling medium “because a photo translates to any language,” said Liz Eswein, one of the founders of the Mobile Media Lab, a digital agency focused entirely on helping companies figure out their Instagram strategies. “It’s easier to get lost in the shuffle on other networks” like Facebook and Twitter, she added.

Ms. Eswein, Brian DiFeo and Anthony Danielle formed the company in March after realizing that their collective Instagram followers — nearly 850,000 — and understanding of the service could be valuable to companies like Nike, Delta, Samsung and Marc Jacobs who were hoping to reach fans of their brands. Now Mobile Media Lab runs promotions and special campaigns for those clients and others.

“We aren’t saying ‘Click here and buy this product’ — it’s more about putting the image in their head and introducing them to a product within the service,” said Ms. Eswein. In that way, it’s closer to traditional advertising, Mr. DiFeo said: “It’s classic marketing. You see an ad on a billboard, or on a bus as it goes by, on TV and now, in an Instagram post. It sticks.”

The mini-industries cropping up on and around Instagram are fueled by the service’s explosive growth. In April, Instagram had 25 million users. Eight months later it has quadrupled that figure and amassed more than five billion photos. In October, the mobile service had 7.8 million daily active visitors, according to comScore, more than Twitter’s 6.6 million.

Both Facebook and Instagram declined to talk about how Instagram might make money directly. But analysts suspect that Facebook will try to weave advertising into the Instagram app at some point, much as it has with its own app.

Bits Blog: Twitter Loses Ability to Properly Display Instagram Photos

7:15 a.m. | Updated Adding comment from Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive.

Welcome to the Photo Wars.

Instagram on Wednesday disabled the ability for Twitter to properly display Instagram photos on its Web site and in its applications. The move escalates tensions between the two companies, which were once friends in the battle against Facebook but have now become direct competitors.

In a status update on Twitter’s Web site, the company said Instagram had disabled its integration with Twitter cards, which are used to display images and content within Twitter messages.

“Users are experiencing issues with viewing Instagram photos on Twitter,” the post said. “This is due to Instagram disabling its Twitter cards integration, and as a result, photos are being displayed using a pre-cards experience.”

Speaking at the LeWeb technology conference, Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, confirmed that the company has removed the ability to send pictures to Twitter, and plans to completely cut off embedding pictures on the Twitter Web site.

“We’ve decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram Web site,” Mr. Systrom said, noting that Instagram images will soon no longer be visible on Twitter. “Obviously things change as a company evolves.”

Mr. Systrom did not say when images will cesase to show up on the site.

Instagram users will still be able to generate a tweet on Twitter when they post a photo. But when someone clicks on the Instagram link in those tweets, they will be taken out of the Twitter site or app and directed to Instagram’s site to view it.

Until now, if someone posted a photo on Instagram and also shared it with their Twitter followers, a click on the “View Photo” link on Twitter’s site would summon it right on the same page.

Mr. Systrom said that photos posted through other sites and services, including Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare, will not be affected.

For now, Instagram photos appear incorrectly on Twitter, sometimes showing up cropped or off center. It is unclear if Instagram will completely disable the ability for Twitter to show pictures on its Web site.

Photo sharing continues to be a volatile battleground for social networking services, and given the potential advertising dollars at stake, the tensions will likely continue to grow.

Although Instagram and Twitter worked closely together during Instagram’s early days, relations between the two companies have soured since the Facebook acquisition.

Now the companies are competing on a number of fronts for consumer eyeballs. Last month Instagram, which had been almost entirely app-based, began rolling out its own Web-centric pages for its 100 million registered users. And Twitter is expected to introduce photo filters to its mobile applications, much like the ones Instagram offers.

When the Facebook acquisition of Instagram closed, Instagram said in a blog post that the deal “means we can now work together to evolve and build a better Instagram for everyone.”

It looks like “everyone” doesn’t include Twitter.

Bits Blog: Twitter Adds Photo Filters in Battle With Instagram

Twitter

So many filters, so little time.

Twitter on Monday announced a new feature that will allow people to edit photos and apply photo filters from within Twitter-built applications.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Coleen Baik, a senior designer at Twitter, said that sharing photos has been an important part of the Twitter experience.

“Starting today, you’ll be able to edit and refine your photos, right from Twitter,” Ms. Baik wrote. “The latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android introduce a few new ways to enhance the images you tweet.”

As I first reported last month, Twitter has been hard at work on filters for some time, hoping to allow people to bypass other photo-sharing services, like Instagram, now owned by Facebook.

Last week Instagram eliminated the ability of its users to share images directly within Twitter. The two companies, once friends, are now direct competitors.

The Twitter app will offer eight filters, which the company said would include black-and-white and a vintage look, and come with a “bird’s-eye view” mode that shows in a grid view how a photo would change. People can also crop and enhance images from within the app.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm, said Monday’s announcement was no suprise given the popularity of filters with today’s smartphone-using consumers.

“Twitter is more valuable to most users than other filtering services, such as Instagram,” Mr. Gartenberg said in an e-mail. “Lack of allowing content to flow where users want it to flow means consumers will choose the service of greater value.”

One of the main reasons the company is using its own filters is because of the company’s Very Important Tweeters, known internally as V.I.T.’s, who are usually celebrities and media personalities. Until now, most V.I.T.’s have taken photos with other apps, including Instagram, where they have larger followings. With the latest addition, Twitter hopes to keep those people inside its own service.

Twitter’s photo filters were built by Aviary, a company that offers software to mobile and Web developers.

Bits Blog: Twitter to Add Photo Filters to Compete With Instagram

Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Twitter is finally learning a lesson from Facebook: If you can’t buy it, build it.

In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram, the popular mobilecentric photo-sharing network, according to people who work at the company but asked not to be named as they are not allowed to discuss unannounced projects. The filters on Instagram make photos look like they were shot with 1960s Kodachrome or with 1890s sepia tone film.

Although adding photo filters to Twitter may seem like a trivial addition to a social network that processes nearly a billion 140-character missives every two days, it could prove to be an important part of the company’s business.

As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site on the Web, has since seen an exodus of people who have opted for Facebook or Instagram. Twitter has proved to be very popular among advertisers who want to reach people on smartphones, where the company’s audience tends to flock.

Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswomen, declined to comment.

According to one Twitter employee, the company’s V.I.T.’s, or Very Important Tweeters, as they are known internally, usually celebrities and media personalities, would be especially happy to see filters in the Twitter mobile apps. Most V.I.T.’s now use Instagram to take photos, and then share them on Twitter, where they often have a larger following.

Although Twitter considered a photocentric product acquisition for some time, the move to build its own filters was hastened after Facebook said it would buy Instagram for $1 billion. (The deal ended up closing at $715 million after Facebook’s precipitous stock drop.)

After the Instagram acquisition was announced, Twitter executives explored buying a competing photo service or application. Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and executive chairman, and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, both led the search, people close to the executives said. After meeting with and appraising some companies, Twitter’s executives decided the price tags were not worth the goods, and decided the company could build its own filters instead.

Although Twitter inked a deal with the photo-storage site Photobucket in June, the company has since started storing images on its own servers.

Twitter is exploring adding other tools to its mobile applications, one employee said, including the ability to upload and possibly edit videos without having to go through a third-party application or service, like YouTube.

Sadly, the Twitter-centric photo filters are not expected to be named after birds.

Bits Blog: Instagram Refreshes App by Including Photo Maps

The photo map feature in the new version of Instagram’s app.

Instagram may be waiting for its billion-dollar sale to Facebook to be finalized, but the company is not resting on its laurels. The company, working out of offices in San Francisco, continues to crank out updates to its popular photo-sharing application.

On Thursday, it rolled out the third version of its application. The update makes several improvements, including refreshing the look of profiles, smoothing out performance bugs and allowing users to mark comments as spam. But its main focus is the addition of a photo map that lets members plot their Instagram pictures on an interactive world map.

“If the last version was all about production and taking the perfect picture, then this version is really about new ways of browsing,” said Kevin Systrom, chief executive and one of the founders of the company. “You can explore photographs, not just in a chronological order, but in geography.”

The new features won’t automatically chart a user’s entire backlog of photographs across a map. Instead, it will scan for photographs that are already tagged with geographical data and let users decide whether or not to plot them. Instagram users can look through the photo maps of their friends and other users, and each time an Instagram user uploads a photograph to the service, it will ask them whether or not they want to add the photograph to the map.

Mr. Systrom hopes that the new features will warm users to the idea of adding geographical data to their pictures.

“We want to make it clear what geotagging is and show how it lets you curate your archive on a map,” said Mr. Systrom.

Currently, only 15 to 25 percent of Instagram users add their location to photographs. Someday the company hopes to offer the ability for users to see all of the images uploaded to Instagram around a certain location or event.

“If people produce more geo-data and understand how its being used, we can do more with it,” said Mr. Systrom. “Wouldn’t you want to look at the London Olympics as it happens on Instagram?”

Instagram now has upward of 80 million users and 4 billion photos in its system. And still, the service is “growing quickly,” said Mr. Systrom. He said the company has had little to no contact with Facebook regarding the latest version of its application.

“We’re independent until they say its O.K. to start collaborating,” he said. “We’re waiting on them to give us the green light.”