Social Networking, 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.

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.

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.

Twitter has launched its own photo-sharing tool, offering a native version of a feature that until now was mostly the domain of third-party apps like Twitpic and yfrog.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network has plans to “launch something awesome” next week. There’s no official word on what will be announced, but we suspect it’s going to be the new iPhone photo-sharing service that we saw just last week.