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TwitPic’s become an integral component to the Twitter experience. Its service, when combined with real-time tweets, has allowed for ground-breaking photo journalism and instant celebrity tweetmemes.

But with all its glory, TwitPic does have its shortcomings. The service has been plagued with oddities and shortages, and it’s yet to evolve in feature set or function. So, if TwitPic isn’t satisfying your Twitter photo sharing needs, you can turn to brand new competitor, TweetPhoto.

TweetPhoto’s offering, available today, includes a plethora of photo-specific features that make it easy to appreciate your own shared photos, and the favorites from your friends, long after your tweet is lost in the real-time stream.

TweetPhoto works like TwitPic in that you use your Twitter name and password to use the site. It also supports uploads by email or mobile, and comments, but that’s where the similarities with TwitPic end.

TweetPhoto users can post their photos to Twitter and Facebook, favorite other photos on the site, see who’s viewing their photos, track stats, geo-tag (it’s automatic from a GPS-enabled phone), moderate comments, search all photos by tags, and even sort photos by Twitter or Facebook friends.

The beauty of TweetPhoto, is that all of these goodies are easily accessible and discoverable from your dashboard view of photos hosted on the site. Tabs across the top navigation make it easy to view your photos, return to favorites, browse friends’ photos, and check out the public stream.

Can It Beat The Competition?

In the Twitter photo space there’s also Pix.im, yFrog and Twixtr, neither of which have managed to steal any thunder from TwitPic.

We’d be remiss not to point out the similarities between the photos-for-Twitter battle and the original microblogging coup d’etat that never came to fruition (remember Jaiku and Pownce?). TweetPhoto, and the rest of the bunch will need to work their way into your hearts and minds if they want to survive.

They can certainly better compete now that more Twitter apps are supporting alternative photo uploading options. And, TweetPhoto definitely has more than a few features we love, but is it enough? Share your thoughts on TweetPhoto, whether you’ll use it, and how you think they can supplant TwitPic in the comments.

More Photo Sharing Resources from Mashable

- 30+ Mobile Photo Sharing Tools

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Twitter today launched a new interface for all users, adding search and trending topics to the sidebar for all those using Twitter.com.

It’s not a totally new concept: Twitter has been testing this interface for months and new accounts were already seeing it, along with selected groups of users. Seemingly content with how those trials went, Twitter has now deployed these features across all Twitter accounts.

The update adds two major features: search and Twitter trends. Both are smart additions: search is a vital part of Twitter that until now required typing “search.twitter.com” in your browser. You can now save those searches, too. Trends, meanwhile, fosters more engagement by showing you what everyone else is talking about.

Twitter is famously shy of adding new features, believing simplicity is the route to success. With essentials like search and trends now present, might they eventually add retweeting to the interface, as a new petition at Retweet.com is demanding?

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: twitter

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Amazon has announced a couple of Kindle-related changes today. First, they’re adding support for two new document types: RTF and DOCX.

Support for PDF as well as DOCX files is experimental, and Amazon is warning that “some complex PDF and DOCX files might not format correctly on your Kindle.”

The other change has to do with pricing; from now on, Amazon will charge 15 cents per megabyte for wireless uploading of personal documents to your Kindle - rounded up to the nearest whole megabyte. This is effectively quite a large price increase, since up until now the fee was 10 cents per document, regardless of the size.

Tags: amazon, Kindle

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Facebook might be known as the world’s biggest social network, but it’s also an enormous photo sharing site. The latest numbers the company has shared with us include 15 billion photos uploaded in total, an average of 220 million new pictures posted each week, and at its busiest, 550,000 images being loaded each second.

In the past month or so, a small team at Facebook has quietly rolled out a new infrastructure – dubbed Haystack - for supporting this massive storage and bandwidth hog. According to the engineers behind it, Haystack represents a 3x performance improvement for Facebook, translating into “substantial” cost savings and more efficient photo loading for users.

Without getting into all of the technical details (Facebook’s engineering blog has an extensive description), the basic change behind the scenes is that a single server now has a lot more capacity for serving and storing photos. With Facebook reportedly spending a ton of money on hardware, that could be big news for the company’s bottom line.

One interesting tidbit for Facebook users that I learned while talking with the engineers behind the project - Doug Beaver, Peter Vaigel, and Jason Sobel – is that when you load a photo from within an album, Facebook actually pre-loads the 3 photos to the right and the left of the one you’re looking at. This is what makes the experience of clicking “previous” and “next” almost instantaneous. I always assumed something like this was the case, but actually reading all the details is fairly interesting - if you’re into that sort of thing.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, infrastructure, photo sharing, servers

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As social networks grow, so too grow attempts to rip off their users. Today, another phishing scam is underway on Facebook with a slightly different twist on yesterday’s outbreak.

If you receive an email with the subject line “Look at this!” and a link to fbstarter.com, do not open it. It’s a phishing scam of the same variety as that we saw on Wednesday, which linked to a site called FBAction.net. Both of these sites attempt to steal your login information, and then send the message that you see below to all of your friends.

Our advice remains the same as yesterday: As always, don’t enter your Facebook password if the URL is not Facebook.com, and contact Facebook if you’re no longer able to access your account.

Of course, this gets a bit trickier as more and more legitimate websites implement Facebook Connect, though we’re yet to see any scams that look to exploit this.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, phishing

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According to French blog Nowhere Else, someone has been able to access Twitter’s administration area, and they’ve got a bunch of screenshots to prove it.

The URL which leads to Twitter’s admin page is simple enough (and open to everyone): “https://admin.twitter.com/admin/”; of course, without a password you cannot get in, and the source does not disclose the nature of the hack; perhaps someone was able to brute force their way in, or they somehow obtained the username and password from one of Twitter’s real admins.

In any case, the screenshots are quite interesting if you want to find out about the inner workings of Twitter; they could be fake, but they’re quite elaborate and there’s lots of them, so the chances that someone photoshopped them are slim. Check out some of them below - I’ve skipped the ones that display sensitive information on a particular user, but there are several over at the source; one even shows the details about BarackObama’s Twitter account.

*Update: Nowhere Else is currently down, but there’s another source with even more images, located here.

*Update #2: commenter Jack noticed some odd details about the images. For example, the edges of the white area of the panel in some of the screenshots are round only on the left side; on others they’re round on both sides. Administrative interfaces often have small visual glitches like this because they aren’t meant to be seen by the public, so this does not definitively prove the images are fake, but it does increase doubt in their authenticity. We’ve contacted Twitter a while ago and are waiting for the official word until we can claim anything for sure.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: admin, hack, hackers, twitter

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Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is moving into social networking, with the 1.0 launch of BuddyPress, an installable, open source software platform that runs on your own website. The software is freely available, and can be downloaded from BuddyPress.org.

The move comes more than a year after WordPress acquired BuddyPress, which at the time was essentially a series of plugins for adding social features to your WordPress blog. Today, it describes itself as “a suite of WordPress plugins and themes” that includes a fairly thorough set of features, like activity streams, groups, and forums.

What exactly is the need for yet another social networking platform at this stage in the game? Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg writes about it on the WordPress development blog. “I don’t think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks … but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use,” he says.

And I agree – I don’t think it’s for everybody, including every type of blog publisher. Between tools like Disqus (which we use here on Mashable), Google Friend Connect, and MyBlogLog, there are already a lot of ways to add community to your blog. Not to mention, your blog needs to have a fairly significant following and passionate fanbase to make an entire social network successful, let alone a few simple cut and paste social networking widgets.

That said, if there is anyone that can make it work, it’s Automattic, who already powers more of the top 100 blogs in the world than anyone else. Some of those, as well as other popular blogs hungry for more page views, may very well be looking for a solution like BuddyPress, that can keep readers on their sites for longer, engaging both around the content and with each other.

Reviews: Disqus, Mashable, WordPress

Tags: automattic, BuddyPress, social networking, Wordpress

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This morning I found out that Shaq is on Facebook, by way of a friend giving a “like” to one of the NBA superstar’s very amusing videos. From there, I became roughly the 350,000th fan of Shaq and started poking around his Page, which, must be rather new, because updates only go back to April 19th.

Shaq was one of the first megastars to land on Twitter, and as we’ve documented, a tidal wave of celebrity users soon followed, culminating in the recent arrival of America’s mainstream measuring stick: Oprah. But Oprah is also on Facebook, as is Ashton Kutcher (Twitter’s top user), and a ton of other famous people.

Although both platforms are essentially broadcasting tools for engaging with fans, which is most interesting when it comes to following the famous? A few thoughts:

Facebook: A Multimedia Experience

The thing you’ll notice immediately about any of these stars’ Facebook Pages is that they are rich with multimedia. Videos and pictures are included on the Page, along with their more Twitter-like text updates, and by way of Facebook’s new design, broadcast to user homepages as well. Stars also share pictures and videos on Twitter, by way of services like TwitPic and 12seconds, but viewing them requires clicking off-site, and you don’t get the all-in-one view you do on Facebook.

Twitter: A Sense of Engagement

On Twitter, fans can @the_real_shaq or @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) to communicate with their favorite stars. Mind you, even though Shaq and Kutcher do respond to some people, it’s unlikely the vast majority of followers will ever get a personal response, simply because the volume is too overwhelming (much like the fan snail mail you might’ve sent as a kid).

Facebook allows users to comment on each item that someone posts to their Page, as well as “Like” it and see other people that have done the same. In some ways, this is a better experience, as it provides an easy way to see all the people that are interacting with the stars’ content. But because there is no way to easily reply directly to individual commenters, the chances of actual interaction with the star are probably about nil.

Twitter Probably Wins, But Maybe It Shouldn’t

The sense that you’re interacting with your favorite stars is powerful, and why Twitter probably wins, despite Facebook having a more engaging environment for actually keeping up with whomever it is you care about.

But if you’re a realist – which I tend to be – I know that Shaq will probably never respond to my Tweets, so I might as well follow him on Facebook instead, where I can get a far better idea of his latest happenings and view it all in one place.

Which Do You Prefer?

Clearly, Facebook Pages - and the Facebook homepage - were re-designed with Twitter in mind. And when our favorite stars (or more aptly, their teams) utilize all of the features at their disposal, they can be a very fun experience. But it’s a lot different than Twitter, and that comes with both pluses and minuses. Which platform do you prefer for following and interacting with the famous? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitpic, Twitter

Tags: ashton kutcher, celebrities, facebook, facebook pages, oprah, shaq, social media, twitter

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Update: Facebook has blocked the problem URL, which should have stopped this particular issue. To avoid future attacks, you should never log into a site claiming to be Facebook unless you’re on Facebook.com.

Facebook is falling prey to a widespread phishing attack today that tries to steal your login and spam your friends.

I’ve got a number of messages in my Facebook inbox with links to “FBAction.net”, a site that displays a fake Facebook login. Enter your details there, and it will spam all your friends with the same message and link. More worrying: you might get locked out of your account for a time until Facebook sorts out this mess.

There is no malicious payload with the attack, it seems: no virus is downloaded or any other nasties: it’s simply a huge nuisance for Facebook users.

As always, don’t enter your Facebook password if the URL is not Facebook.com, and contact Facebook if you’re no longer able to access your account.

Tags: facebook

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This news has been a long time coming, but now it’s an all but certainty: Time Warner and AOL, who joined forces in a $164 billion deal in 2000, are going their separate ways. Specifically, Time Warner anticipates spinning off AOL, possibly in multiple parts, as separate companies to Time Warner shareholders.

We don’t need to rehash all of the reasons this deal didn’t work (impeccably bad timing, the decline of dial-up Internet access, mismanagement, etc.), but rather, look at what remains of AOL, and what’s still interesting about this company almost a decade after the deal that came to symbolize the absolute peak of the first dotcom boom.

The most interesting piece that remains of AOL in our eyes is probably the smallest – at least from a revenue standpoint. AOL People Networks – which comprises of several AOL acquisitions – like Bebo, Socialthing, Yedda, Userplane, and Goowy, as well as long-popular products like AIM and ICQ - is an intriguing company on its own, and actually one of the biggest in the space we cover.

Just yesterday, AOL launched Socialthing for Websites, a tool that lets website publishers add FriendFeed-like aggregation of their user’s activities across the Web. Meanwhile, Bebo – though perhaps one of the priciest deals of the Web 2.0 boom – is starting to show signs of growth in the US as it has become the default profile for AIM users and added its own social aggregation features.

AIM, and to a lesser extent ICQ, still serve tens of millions of users, which creates a platform for People Networks to drive adoption of its other social products. We’re expecting to see further advances from AOL in this area soon, in the next few releases of AIM. Overall, you’re looking at a pretty far-reaching social software company that targets both consumers and Web publishers.

That said, all is far from rosy for AOL, and spinning off a sexy but unprofitable division of AOL might not make a lot of financial sense. Overall, advertising revenue across all AOL properties decreased 20% in the company’s most recent quarter – almost as bad as the 27% decline experienced in the antiquated dial-up Internet business.

It’s more likely that AOL would split across the lines of Web and Access, leaving People Networks as an intriguing piece of a still large and bureaucratic organization. Which is a shame, because with all of the tools in its arsenal, AOL - at least the part of it that we deal with - could actually rise again if managed correctly.

Reviews: FriendFeed

Tags: aim, aol, bebo, Socialthing!, timewarner

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