The wildly popular photo filtering app is already on its way to becoming a consummate social network, as users’ photos are displayed on a news-feed-type stream complete with commenting and “liking” abilities. With Instagram, Obama, who already has the reputation of a tech-savvy president, looks to reach a social media-using crowd that is distinct, but not altogether different than the crowd he reaches via Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s what the Instagram team had to say about it on their official blog:

We’re excited to welcome President Barack Obama to Instagram! We look forward to seeing how President Obama uses Instagram to give folks a visual sense of what happens in the everyday life of the President of the United States. In addition to sharing photos through the @barackobama Instagram account, the Obama 2012 staff is asking supporters to share their photos from the campaign trail with the tag #obama2012.

And this is the first photo uploaded to the Obama Instagram account:

Obama has already tackled the Twitter and Facebook landscapes, amassing over 11.7 million followers and 24.3 million likes respectively. And last year, the President spread his social reach even more by opening up a Foursquare account in August and joining Tumblr in October.

Like all of those social accounts, Obama’s campaign staff will be the ones actually uploading the content. But the Instagram account with give Obama fans, political junkies, or simply interested citizens a somewhat inside look into the campaign trail.

Today, Instagram is launching their most ambitious update to date, version 2.0, just in time for their 1-year birthday in October.

The biggest change in the new Instagram is the live filtering. Unlike the old version where you had to snap a photo and then apply one of the filters, Instagram 2.0 allows you to apply the filter to the in-app camera on the fly. Basically you get to see your shot in various different formats before you even take it.

Once you take a photo, you can change the filter afterwards, even returning a photo back to normal after snapped with a filter in place.

This could encourage users to use the in-app camera, instead of choosing to snap photos with the iPhone camera and import them into Instagram for filtering.

Speaking of filters, v2.0 adds four news filters: Amaro, Rise, Hudson and Valencia.

They have also added instant tilt-shift so that you can manipulate the focus with selective blur live. The borders that appear on some of the filters like “Nashville” are now optional. You can remove them at any point in the photo-taking process.

Another big change is that Instagram has upped the resolution of the photos that you take using the app. It’s important to note that the photos will still be 612 x 612 when shared and viewed with the app, but they will be much higher-res when saved to your device after you upload them. This means that your Instagram-filtered photos will be accessible only to you as high-res -

High-resolution versions of your Instagram photos are saved to your device’s camera roll after you upload the photo to Instagram. This means that you are the only one with access to high-resolution versions of your photos. The resolution of these photos is 1936×1936 on the iPhone4 and 1536×1536 on the iPhone3GS (the resolution of photos uploaded to the app is 612×612). Others will not be able to access your high-resolution photos on Instagram share pages or third-party websites/apps that use our API.

Instagram is still only available on iOS, much to the chagrin of Android users. This update is supported by iPhone 3GS and 4, iPod Touch, and both iPads.

When I first heard about Instagram, I said, “Oh, so a free Hipstamatic…sounds good.” I quickly realized that Instagram is providing more than just photo filtering (which is fun). Instagram is a full-fledged social network, a fun and satisfying one at that.

With its own photo-news feed, comments, likes, hashtag capabilities, “@” tagging, and geotagging, it has won the hearts of many more than just this writer. Now over 7 million users strong, the application has just hit another milestone.

Instagram announced today on their blog that they have just surpassed 150 million photos shared. They also noted that 15 new photos roll in per second.

Thank you for sharing your stories through Instagram. Here’s to another 150 million. (If you want to help us get there, take a look at our Jobs page – we’re hiring!)

That “we’re hiring” blip is interesting because one of the things people find so charming about the company is their tiny workforce. Until just recently, the company had been able to run with just 4 employees. A few days ago AdWeek reported that they had just hired their 5th employee, Jessica Zollman, as their “community evangelist.”

Here’s photo #150,000,000, as snapped by @janefot

Instagram is being used by celebrities, businesses and news organizations as well. Companies like Kate Spade and new outlets like NBC and CNN have their own accounts. Justin Bieber almost crashed the servers when he tweeted out his first Instagram pic a couple of weeks ago.

Remember that 7 million user stat? That’s even more impressive than you think. As VentureBeat points out, Instagram just launched last October. At this point in their lives, neither Facebook nor Twitter had even reached 1 million users.

What photo sharing site do you use most often? Let us know.

For a quick history lesson, Photobucket was founded back in 2003 and really became a website for hosting image and video content on Myspace. News Corporation acquired it in 2007, and as Munro explained to us, even though Photobucket and Myspace were together under the same ownership, they, ironically, didn’t integrate.

What’s even more ironic is that Myspace built its own photo hosting solution. However, because of its association with Myspace, Photobucket wasn’t able to make any connections with Facebook. Since the service was declining, Fox wanted to sell it.

In December of 2009, Photobucket spun out from News Corp. and merged with mobile company Ontela. Munro says this move was “the beginning of the road for the turning point.”

This merger with Ontela brought Photobucket not only investors, which funded the spinout, but it also brought mobile technology and patents. In addition to this, Ontela brought 20 million online monthly unique visitors in the U.S.

“What we saw is, early on with Ontela, that photos were moving to mobile devices,” said Munro.

Previously, Photobucket was Web-focused, but with Ontela, the company began to target mobile. Through this focus, the company has developed apps such as the photo-filtering app Snapbucket and built up its mobile user base to nearly 6 million.

Now, the company wants to tie these goals together and provide a “ubiquitous experience between Web and mobile.”

Photobucket is also reinventing itself in other areas such as its recent partnership with Twitter. As part of the partnership, Photobucket will host the images that users upload to Twitter. Munro told us that the partnership would not only bring in revenue, but that it would also help drive awareness and traffic since every photo will have a caption that says, “Powered by Photobucket.”

“From a branding perspective, it really helps bring some of that mojo back that Photobucket had,” he said.

He went on to say that they were currently in talks with other companies in regards to more partnerships.

As for the future of Photobucket, Munro indicated that the service would make advances in video. He said they had noticed a 300 percent increase in video uploads in the last 3 months and that they believed this trend would continue. They are planning to add a video feature to Snapbucket soon as well.

“It a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a video has to be exponentially more,” he added.

It appears that Photobucket is on the right track to making a full comeback, but the road getting there was anything but easy. Munro said, “In some ways, I think a spin off is even more difficult than even a startup.”

He told us that the biggest challenge was changing the culture from a corporate one to one that was innovative and more aligned with a startup. To help encourage this new environment, Photobucket shuts down for a week every six months to concentrate only on innovative products. The company has seen new apps and services born as a result of this endeavor.

Do you think Photobucket is moving in the right direction?

TechCrunch has obtained “roughly 50 MB of images and documents outlining the entire thing.” According to their post, the new photo sharing app looks incredible. The words used are “killer,” “awesome” and “amazing” – so that sounds promising.

The app, possibly titled “Hovertown” or “Withpeople,” is built on Facebook’s social graph but looks to be a standalone application as of right now. It’s likely that the app would be integrated into the Facebook iPhone app and even the main website eventually.

TechCrunch says that it looks like a hybrid of Path, Instagram and Color, which is pretty exciting to me considering how much of an Instagram fan I’ve become as of late. If that’s the case, the new app would promote seamless sharing with public groups, private groups and would contain cool filters and stuff, right?

This all sounds awesome, but I hope the photo sharing app works better than the actual Facebook app for iPhone. I’m only speaking from my own personal experience, but I’ve found that app to be a buggy mess at times.

And if this new app is launched relatively soon, one can only imagine it will be talked about as some sort of response to the news that Twitter will be deeply integrated into iOS 5. That move, as discussed, could change the world of mobile application development on the iPhone.

A couple of weeks ago, Twitter announced its partnership with PhotoBucket to provide users with a native photo uploading service. This will allow users to upload photos and attach them directly to their tweets without using a third-party service like yfrog or twitpic.

20th Century Fox has teamed up with the much talked about mobile app Color to provide fans a look into the premiere, both from the perspective of the fans outside as well as the people inside. Photos taken at the premiere, which is Sunday at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, will be instantly shared with those in the vicinity in a “Water for Elephants Premiere Group” or “conversation.”

You may ask how this benefits you, if you can’t make it to the NYC premiere on Sunday. Well, the aggregated content from the premiere will be streamed online at the site www.color.com/waterforelephants. Currently, the site asks us to come back Sunday when photos will start streaming at 4:30, when the stars begin to arrive. The site will also have an exclusive clip of the film available at 4 pm EST.

“Water For Elephants” is based on a massively popular novel of the same title by Sara Gruen.  The film stars Reese Witherspoon, Chritoph Waltz (Oooh, That’s a Bingo!) and up from the teeny vampire ranks, Robert Pattinson.

Not only will the shared photos come from fans on the outside, but Fox is having some of the producers and talent from the film take photos using the app, which should show fans the red carpet walk from the perspective of the stars.

The Hollywood Reporter talked to Color co-founder Peter Pham:

“With such a big following of Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, people will be camping out just to get to the front of the barricades,” Color co-founder Peter Pham tells THR, who likened the app to a “visual Twitter.” “It’ll give you a really good sense of what it’s like from the fan’s perspective. It’s not the high-def professional cameraman taking the photos perched in a specific spot.”

This most likely will not be the last time the entertainment industry calls upon Color or similar apps down the road.  Photo sharing, especially if those streams are broadcast to people at home, could give fans a look at concerts, premieres and award shows from the inside perspective.  And for celebriphiles, the inside perspective is what is most desired. 

Michael A. Stefanone, PhD, says the results suggest women identify more strongly with their image and appearance, and use Facebook as a way to compete for attention.

In the study, 311 participants with an average age of 23.3 years — 49.8 percent of whom were female — completed a questionnaire measuring their contingencies of self worth. They were also asked about their typical behaviors on Facebook.

“Those whose self esteem is based on public-based contingencies (defined here as others’ approval, physical appearance and outdoing others in competition) were more involved in online photo sharing, and those whose self-worth is most contingent on appearance have a higher intensity of online photo sharing,” said Stefanone.

The purpose of the study was to investigate variables that explain specific online behavior on social network sites. Among other things, the team looked at the amount of time subjects spent managing profiles, the number of photos they shared, the size of their online networks and how promiscuous they were in terms of “friending” behavior.

“Although it’s stereotypical and might have been predicted,” he says, “it is disappointing to me that in the year 2011 so many young women continue to assert their self worth via their physical appearance — in this case, by posting photos of themselves on Facebook as a form of advertisement.”

“Perhaps this reflects the distorted value pegged to women’s looks throughout the popular culture and in reality programming from ‘The Bachelor’ to ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians.’”

The study, “Contingencies of Self-Worth and Social-Networking-Site Behavior,”is published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

"People love tagging their friends and family in photos, but we’ve heard that it can be a tedious process. You now can add tags with just a couple of clicks directly from your home page and other sections of the site, using the same face detection technology that cameras have used for years," explains Facebook’s new product manager for Photos, Sam Odio. "We’re running a limited test of this technology so you may not see it yet."

"With this new feature, tagging is faster since you don’t need to select a face," says Odio. "It’s already selected for you, just like those rectangles you see around your friends’ faces when you take a photo with a modern digital camera. All that’s left for you to do is type a name and hit enter."

Odio is the founder of Divvyshot, which Facebook acquired in early April, at which point he told us, "We’re thrilled to be joining the Facebook team and look forward to kicking ass there."

According to Odio, 99% of people using Facebook have uploaded at least one photo, and over 100 million photos are uploaded every day.

Update: I orginally referred to what they’re doing as facial recognition, but it’s actually detection. It recognizes that there is a face, but not necessarily who that face belongs to (so far at least). Face.com is already doing facial recognition for Facebook, however. See that here.

You can use the service to upload photos or videos, but it offers a unique feature in that you can customize what your photo albums look like. You can choose backgrounds, pick how many photos you want to display across, up and down, etc.

Social media hounds may particularly like the Facebook app, which lets you easily import the photos into Facebook from Polaroid Studio. The site also has a store right in it where you can purchase various items with your photos on them. If you want a coffee mug, a Calendar, playing cards, or whatever, look no further than the site where you are already keeping your photos. That’s kind of convenient.

The service is still young, but so far it claims already over 62 million photos. They are also about to launch a pro version for professional photographers that they will be able to take and brand as their own.

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Nintendo announced that after 5pm Pacific Time today, the Nintendo DSi will offer Facebook Connect photo integration. Users of the DSi system and the DSi Camera application will be able to take pictures with either of the system’s two cameras and upload their photos directly to their Facebook profile.

Users can tap on the Facebook icon on the DSi’s touch screen to do this. The system must be connected to an Internet connection of course.

"Facebook and Nintendo DSi build on the trend of personalization that is so important to consumers," says Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. "We’re giving people the tools to express themselves in creative new ways and show off the results to their friends and family on Facebook."

Nintendo is careful to remind people that the DSi comes with parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access.