Photo Sharing | featured news

The battle lines are sharpening between Facebook and Twitter, as they fight to become the prime hub for photo sharing on the Internet.

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service that Facebook bought this year, is the target of a storm of outrage on Twitter and other sites after a change in its user agreement hinted that it might use shared photos in ads.

Images from Instagram, the photo-sharing app that lets user spruce up their work with a slate of arty and retro filters, no longer show up on Twitter, a popular place to share them.

Pinterest, which allows users to share photographs, recipes and other media on custom "pinboards," raised $100 million in a funding round led by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten.

Did "sexting" just get safer? Maybe, but probably not. A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows users to take a picture, send it and control how the message is visible – between 1 and 10 seconds.

The site, which allows users to pin images of products they like on online scrapbooks, has seen its traffic grow almost sevenfold in five months and is ranked by one research firm as the No. 3 social network behind Facebook and Twitter.

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

Facebook is spending $1 billion to buy the photo-sharing company Instagram in the social network's largest acquisition ever.

There have been some newsworthy failures over the last couple of years in the photo-sharing field. Facebook has pretty much replaced the need for stand-alone apps because it does everything that most people want, allowing sharing to be relatively seamless between smartphone and profile. After years of searching, I've finally found an app worth using.

Start-up Posterous, best known for its simple blogging service via email, has revamped the company around a new product called Posterous Spaces, which is designed to help people easily privately share photos and videos with friends or family.