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.

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.

At least according to data from SNL Kagan. Variety reports that HBO ended 2012 with 28.7 million subscribers, which means that as of the last known report, Netflix is now beating HBO in the U.S.

That’s a pretty significant development in the streaming wars.

It’s important to note that this is only a U.S. victory for Netflix. Although the company reported 1.02 million new subscribers internationally, it only boosts their total to 7.14 million. HBO boasts over 114 million subscribers worldwide.

HBO and Netflix have a lot in common. They are both platforms which host TV shows and films. And with Netflix’s recent push, both companies now produce their own content (and it’s pretty well done). Both companies offer online streaming apps filled with said content.

But of course, the difference is that HBO is still in bed with cable, while Netflix is the top choice of cordcutters everywhere. It will be interesting to see whether HBO keeps up with Netflix in subscriber growth over the next year, or whether the tide continues to turn in favor of the true, standalone, streaming experience.

This nugget isn’t the only interesting thing to come out of CEO Reed Hastings’ letter to shareholders. We also learned that Netflix is planning on unveiling a $11.99 family plan that offers up to four simultaneous streams. We also learned that Netflix’s original series House of Cards was able to rope in subscribers and keep them subscribed after it was over.

LinkedIn is currently testing user mentions, something that other networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ have had for some time and that users rely on quite heavily. Simply put, user mentions in posts let the people you’re talking about know that you’re talking about them.

If you’re currently part of the test, you’ll see a new tip box on your status update box. It’ll say “Now you can type a name to mention a member of company.”

Typing a name of a person or a company prompts a drop-down menu with choices arranged with the most likely suggestions (your actual connections) at the top.

Like Facebook, the mentions simply appear as links to the users’ profile inside the status. When someone mentions you in a post, you’ll receive a notification.

Apart from the aforementioned ability to tip people off to your statuses, mentions give users browsing their feeds and easier way to check out other users.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told The Next Web:

“We are currently testing the ability for members to directly mention each other in professional conversations on LinkedIn. This test is part of our ongoing efforts to help members further engage with their networks in meaningful ways across the LinkedIn platform.”

After some time as an iOS-only service, Instagram finally launched on Android in April of 2012 and quickly racked up over a million downloads in less than 24 hours.

Thus began the great, but short Instagram platform war that saw iOS users whine about their beloved service opening up to the Plebian droiders. In less than six months, Instagram for Android hit 50 million downloads.

And now, in just one year, Android users have risen to become almost half the user base. The photo-sharing network broke the 100 million monthly active user milestone about a month ago, so we can assume that almost 50 million active users are snapping, filtering, and uploading via Android.

In a celebratory blog post, Philip McAllister of Instagram’s Android team acknowledges that the the Android community has been vital to spreading the service around the world:

Instagram for Android has helped make this community more global than ever. Major events such as Brazil’s Círio de Nazaré festival, the 85th birthday of Thailand’s King Bhumibol, and a streak of severe thunderstorms throughout Malaysia have been captured by Android Instagrammers and shared to global audiences like never before. We’ve also seen Android Instagrammers contribute to the community in innovative and powerful ways, including @daveedgamboa’s incredible jumpstagrams around Southern California, photos of England’s beautiful Lancashire county from @adamgrayson and even a glimpse into the life of Kenya’s nomads from @grantsmind.

So, Android Instagram users: How’s your first year been?

That’s the word from SXSW, where the company has announced that they can now boast 6 million paid subscribers. Back in December, Spotify announced that their paid subscriber total had hit 5 million. In July 2012, it was 4 million. And back in January of 2012, it was 3 million. If you do your math, you’ll notice that it took roughly a year for Spotify to turn 3 million in 5 million, but only 3 months to turn 5 million into 6 million.

Long story short: Spotify is growing faster than it ever has.

It’s not just paid subscriptions that are growing – total users are also up 4 million in the past three months, from 20 to 24 million. Of course, total users counts are great and all, but the big questions is how many unpaid users Spotify can turn into paid users with subscription-only features like mobile play, offline radio, and no advertisements.

Spotify has made a few non-subscriber based headlines in the past few months. Back in December, they made a splash when they acquired the catalog of Metallica, longtime foes of services like Napster. In the past three months, Spotify has landed on a bunch of new devices like TiVo, Roku, and Windows Phone 8.

And they just expanded the beta for their new web player in the U.K. The browser app should be making its way to the U.S. soon.

It comes just five weeks after the photo-sharing network announced 90 million MAUs and a little of ten months after being acquired by Facebook.

“Now, nearly two and a half years later, over 100 million people use Instagram every month. It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram—sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs,” says Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.

When Instagram announced 90 million MAUs back in January, it was the first time that they had ever reported official active users numbers. Some speculated that the timing had something to do with reports (however misleading) that Instagram was leaking users.

“Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco and even to events in our own backyards. Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of. For this reason, we feel extremely lucky to have the chance to build this with all of you. So from our team to the hundred million people who call Instagram home, we say thank you. Thank you for sharing your world and inspiring us all to do the same,” says Systrom.

Instagram says that they are processing 40 million photos per day, plus 8,500 likes and 1,000 comments per second. Earlier this month, the company launched a new web feed and for the first time a true web experience.

Some users are seeing a new message appear atop their streams on Twitter.com. It notifies them that someone (a particular @person) is “back on Twitter.”

“Welcome @person back to Twitter,” it reads. “You friend @person is back on Twitter. Mention them in a tweet to welcome them back.”

Inside the prompt is a quick link to compose a tweet that mentions said @person.

This appears to be a fairly new feature and was just spotted by Fred Wilson over on his AVC blog (via AllTwitter). It’s clear that Twitter is looking to help spur engagement between users, especially ones that they fear may be flirting toward the dark side (or have just come back from it). You know, that “inactive user” label. Any social network is going to be constantly waging a war against inactive users, but Twitter, specifically, has seen its share of troubles in that department.

In December 2012, Twitter hit 200M monthly active users. But some reports have put the number of actual Twitter accounts at well over 500 million. Of course, some of this discrepancy can be attributed to duplicate, fake, and otherwise spam accounts. But some of it has to do with users who created an account, quit, and then never came back.

It makes sense that Twitter would try to rope users back to becoming regular daily or monthly users, and tapping their pals to welcome them back and get them engaged seems like a good plan.

It’s unclear exactly what prompts Twitter to feature an account in the “Welcome Back” message. It could be that the user tweeted again for the first time in a long time – or it could be that they reactivated a stagnant or deactivated account. We’ve reached out to Twitter for clarification and will update this article accordingly.

Whatever the case, the Facebook police know that they need to “convince” defectors to come back. How do they do that? Well, brute force of course.

The last time we saw Jimmy Kimmel’s Facebook police, they were making sure that you accepted your mom’s friend request.

That doesn’t mean that Facebook just lets it happen, however. Although some reports have estimated that 40% of the Facebook users under the age of 18 are actually under the age of 13, Facebook continues to remove accounts beloning to underage kids every day. Some estimates put the number of daily removals at more than 20,000.

But it’s a huge game of whack-a-mole. Where one underage account is terminated, a hundred pop up in its place. And Facebook knows they’re impotent.

Do you think Facebook should abolish the age limit? Do you have kids under the age of 13? Do they operate Facebook accounts? Let us know in the comments.

Speaking at the Oxford Media Convention recently, Facebook policy director in the U.K. and Ireland Simon Milner discussed the social network’s problem policing their no kids under 13 rule.

“We haven’t got a mechanism for eradicating the problem [of underage users],” he said. He went on to call the problem “tricky.”

“Facebook does have a rule that users have to be over 13, as does YouTube, which not a lot of people know. It is not because we think that Facebook is unsafe but because of a US law about children’s online privacy. So we have it as a global rule.”

Milner is of course referring to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), an old law that details how minors’ personal data can be accessed and shared. The FTC recently announced some additions to COPPA, which they say will strengthen the law. Since the law was enacted way back in 1998, it makes sense that they would feel the need to update it for the digital age where social networks, apps, and other internet properties are snatching information at every turn.

The FTC’s proposal is a whopping 169 pages long, and makes a couple of extremely influential changes to the law. In our previous coverage of the FTC’s announcement, Zach Walton described the changes as such:

The first is a definition change that files geolocation information under a child’s personal information. The change means that services can not track a child across various Web sites and other online services.

In the same vein, the second update extends privacy protections to modern Web applications apps, games and Web site plug-ins. The latter is the most interesting because some Web sites appeal to people both young and old. These plug-ins can be used to track the adults, but what about the children? How will a Web site know who’s a child and who isn’t?

Of course, Facebook is one social provider who has taken issue with the “plug-ins” addition. Their ubiquitous “like” button, which appears on pretty much every website you would ever visit could be affected. They claim such regulations could “chill innovation.”

But back to Milner, who went on to say that the most obvious mechanism, an age check, is impractical:

“It is increasingly difficult to know what to do. You can’t make everyone prove their age – that would get privacy advocates up in arms.”

He’s right. Facebook’s real names policy catches enough flak – can you imagine what kind of hell Facebook would catch for some sort of true age verification system? Let’s say they attempted something like that anyway – damn the dissidents. It would be pretty much impossible, or at the very least a resource-hogging nightmare. So, short of implementing a long, resource-intensive age verification system that would probably infuriate everyone, what’s Facebook going to do?

One idea that’s been thrown around is to simply open up the site to kids under the age of 13 – but with a load of restrictions. Those restrictions, in theory, would allow parents to control their young childrens’ accounts and would do more to make sure their info stayed private on the site. The rumor first started floating around back in June of 2012, which led to privacy groups demanding that Facebook better give parents ultimate control over privacy, if they chose to let in sub-13-year-olds.

Facebook responded, saying,

“Enforcing age restrictions on the Internet is a difficult issue, especially when many reports have shown parents want their children to access online content and services. We welcome today’s recommendations by consumer, privacy, health and child groups as we continue our dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policymakers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.”

Two congressmen joined the party, sending Facebook a pointed letter.

“At this point, we have made no final decision whether to change our current approach of prohibiting children under 13 from joining Facebook,” said the company nearly six months ago.

Currently, Facebook still requires members to be at least 13 years old, and there are still plenty of 10,11, and 12-year-olds on the site. The Guardian quotes a study that says 34% of 9-12-year-olds in the U.K. have Facebook accounts.

And those kids face the same kinds of danger that even older kids and teens face on social media – scammers, bullies, criminals. Just yesterday, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled that convicted sex offenders cannot be barred from operating Facebook accounts, as it’s unconstitutional to deny them such a ubiquitous form of communication. I happen to agree with the ruling, but I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there who, upon hearing a headline like that, immediately imagine their children being preyed upon.

The bottom line seems to be that young kids are going to find a way onto Facebook, Facebook is currently powerless to stop it, and the only real option seems to be to just let them in officially, and try to give parents control over their experience on the site. You know, if you can’t stop them, at least try to make it super safe.

Do you have any ideas? Just let them join in an official capacity? Age checks? It appears that Facebook is kind of stumped. Let us know in the comments.