What happened to Collier could happen to all of us. You see a nice picture on Facebook of a group of people and you think “oh, that’s lovely. I like that!” and so you like it. But lurking in the shadows are exposed testicles.

“Sneaky nuts” is a prank that involves sneakily showing one’s balls in a photograph, you know, by putting them through the zipper or something at the last minute. It’s kind of like a photobomb, but with your balls. Yeah, it’s not the internet’s best moment for sure.

Collier, a Liberal member of the Western Australian Legislative Council who currently serves Minister for Energy; Training and Workforce Development, says that he was simply tricked by a sneaky photo.

Hence the “sneaky nuts” part:

“At first glance it appeared to be a harmless picture. It was a silly mistake on my part. I only became aware of the actual content of the photo when shown by a journalist…This obviously highlights the pitfalls of social media. I apologise if I caused any offense,” said Collier in a statement.

The apology wasn’t enough for Labor Party MP sue Ellery, who has called for an investigation.

“This is a man who is a senior minister in charge of the professional standards of dealing with young people and young people’s use of social media,” she said.

It looks like politics are the same no matter where you go.

The feature, called “Photos of You,” was given a two-week long soft launch period in which users could opt-in if they so chose. Today it has been turned on for everyone.

“We wanted to take a moment to remind you that – if you haven’t turned it on already—your Photos of You section on Instagram will become visible today to those who can currently see your profile. Remember, you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it,” says Instagram.

Instagram said that “many” users have already opted to turn the feature on, during the two-week soft launch.

All of the photos that you’re tagged in will now appear in a special new profile section, aptly titled “Photos of You.” As Instagram says, you’ll have full privacy control over this. You can adjust your settings to make sure Instagram asks you to approve any photo before it appears in the section.

Besides the creation of the new Photos of You section, this new feature clears up an irksome problem with Instagram tagging. Before, there was really no way of telling whether a photo’s @ mention was there to direct users to it, or if it meant that the user was actually present in the photo.

Hadouken, which was started by Japanese schoolgirls, involves photos that are made to look like special effects are going down in real life. Alba has posted several tries on her Instagram account, all with varying levels of success. The latest, though, is making rounds online because it looks pretty damn good. Check it out.

Google is doing away with the old layout in favor of a multi-column layout that puts more emphasis on photos and video. The new layout will also sport “delightful animations” that see the sharebox and menus sliding around the UI.

Hangouts is still the major selling point of Google+, but Google has decided to spread the love a little more by releasing a separate Hangouts app. It’s still tied into Google+, however, and features all the sharing capabilities of its bigger brother.

Finally, photos on Google+ are soon going to get a major facelift as Google adds a number of photo editing features right into Google+. The best part is that you as a user don’t have to do anything. Features like Auto Highlight and Auto Enhance are automatically applied thanks to Google’s advanced algorithms.

All the above features will be rolling out to all Google+ users over the next week. In fact, the new layout design seems to be live now.

The story of the three missing girls (now women) who have been rescued after being kidnapped a decade ago, has taken the nation by storm. It’s a tragic story, without question, but it’s nice to at least see one in which the victims survived.

Amanda Berry has been deemed the “real hero” of this whole thing by Cleveland police, after she called 911 and got the whole thing “rolling”.

There has been a website dedicated to finding Berry, including these pictures from before the kidnapping:

Hat tip to EveryJoe, who also shares these photos of Gina DeJesus, one of the other kidnapped women:

Photos of the third woman, Michelle Knight, are not circulating so much. According to Mail Online, while Berry’s and DeJesus’ cases have remained “high profile” over the past ten years, not as much is known about Knight, and according to the publication, no picture has been published of her so far.

With the updated apps, you’ll be able to add people to photos for the first time. All you have to do is snap your picture, apply your favorite filter, and in the publishing phase of the process you’ll see a new “Add People” button. From there, you can tag friends, businesses, or anyone and anything with a username.

Of course, you’ve always been able to tag people on Instagram. But before, the tagging system worked a lot like Twitter – you could @ mention users but that’s about it. There was really no way of telling whether the photo’s @ mention was simply there to direct the user to it, or if it meant that user was actually in the photo.

“Photos are memories of the people, places and moments that mean the most to us. We have always sought to give you simple and expressive ways to bring the stories behind your photos to life. Your captions and hashtags capture the ‘what?’ and your Photo Map answers the ‘where?’ but until today we’ve never quite been able to answer the ‘who?’” says Instagram.

All of the photos you’re tagged in will now appear in a new profile section called “Photos of You.” The new feature will have all the same privacy settings of Facebook photos – mainly you’ll be able to control whether or not any tagged photo appears in your Photos of You section. You can adjust your settings to make sure you have to approve every tagged photo before it pops up for everyone to see.

Instagram is giving users until May 16th to familiarize themselves with the tagging feature before everyone’s Photos of You sections go public.

This new feature comes in version 3.5 on both iOS and Android. This update also adds a “report a problem” button to the app and also puts your privacy settings accesible on your profile screen.

Apparently, Snapchat is processing more photos daily than Instagram. And not just more – nearly four times as many.

The figure was announced today by Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference put on by All Things D.

According to Spiegel, Snapchat is moving upwards of 150 million photos across the network every day. If you compare that to another popular photo-sharing service like Instagram, you find that Snapchat is moving a significantly more amount of total photos. Instagram currently boasts 40 million photos taken per day.

Of course, Instagram and Snapchat are very different services. Instagram is about long-lasting photos, ones that can be liked, commented upon, and browsed in a social networking frame. Snapchat, on the other hand, is a lot more focused on person-to-person communication.

If you’re unfamiliar with Snapchat, the premise is quite simple – but rather ingenious. Users can send short photos or videos to other users – self-deleting photos or videos being the most important aspect. Users can designate exactly how long they want the photo or video to stay viewable, after which time it will disappear. The app even notifies the sender if the recipient tried to make the communication more than ephemeral by taking a screenshot.

When it first launched, Snapchat defended itself against allegations that it was simply an app for sexting. On its face, it does appear like the perfect sort of app to send sexts without the fear of permanence. And believe me, I’m sure that there is plenty of that going on. But with 150 million photos taken daily, it’s clear that Snapchat is more a serious player and less of a niche sexting app.

Earlier this year, it became clear that Facebook saw Snapchat as a competitor when they released their “Poke” app. To say that the Poke app is heavily inspired by Snapchat is putting it the best way possible.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, they say that they see “more than 300 million photos uploaded every day.” By that figure, Snapchat is seeing nearly half of what Facebook sees every day. Now that’s incredible.

Allen tweeted out the pic featuring himself and Gates clothed appropriately, amidst old-school computers.

So much fun catching up w/ computing pioneers at the #LCMCelebration last night! Here I am with old friend @billgates twitter.com/PaulGAllen/sta…

— Paul Allen (@PaulGAllen) April 4, 2013

Here’s the iconic photo from 1981, for comparison.

The two were attending an event hosted by Allen at Allen’s Living Computer Museum in Seattle. The event was a reunion of sorts, with many early computing and tech pioneers in attendance. According to GeekWire, the staff worked to acquire the same old-school computer models to recreate the photo beforehand.

Pretty cool, huh?

Google’s Jon Emerson discusses the update in a Google+ post:

Jon Emerson19 hours ago

Upload and share full-size photos from your desktop

Back in December we launched full-size backups of your Android photos (http://goo.gl/coFZ7). Today we're making it possible upload full-size photos from your desktop — whether you're updating your profile photo, creating a new album to share, or backing up pictures from a recent vacation.

To enable full-size desktop uploads, just visit your settings at www.google.com/settings/plus, and check "Upload my photos at full size." Afterwards, any files larger than 2048px will count towards your Google storage (up to 5GB free). Photo storage at 2048px or smaller remains free and unlimited.

p.s. With lots more full-size photos on Google+, pan and zoom is going to get a lot more fun. Check out +Dave Cohen's recent announcement for more details: http://goo.gl/cmJ7i.

#googleplusupdate#googleplusphotos73    37 Powered by socialditto

Given Google+’s standing appeal among many photographers (and wannabe photographers), the feature is surely a welcome one.

[via CNET]

Now, it looks like Facebook is looking for more ways to make sure people are still creating content on the site.

Facebook is testing a new button in its top blue bar that allows users to post a status or a photo/video quickly, from any page on the site.

Here are some screenshots of the test courtesy of Mashable, who first spotted it.

When you click it, a familiar lightbox pops up:

It’s important to note that the user who saw the test obviously doesn’t have Facebook Graph Search or the new look news feed – two new products that Facebook is rolling out very slowly. Has anyone who has Graph Search or the new news feed seen this test?