Instagram just got a new, colorful logo!

 

Instagram and its suite of apps have gotten an icon refresh. Instead of the blue square we’ve all come to know, the Instagram logo is now bright, colorful, and embraces the flat design trend.

The same look applies to its Hyperlapse, Boomerang, and Layout apps as well, tying all four apps together.

Inside the Instagram app, things are the total opposite: There are small UI changes, such as a white top bar and black selected icons instead of blue. The company says it’s designed to make the layout more simple, so you can focus primarily on the images being shared.

The rainbow-themed icons are supposed to represent Instagram’s diverse community, which it says brings all sorts of life and color to the platform.

This is the first logo redesign since Instagram first emerged five years ago. The blue also separates it from its parent company Facebook, which bought Instagram back in 2012 for $1 billion.

Source

You can finally post full-size landscape and portrait photos on Instagram!

Instagram is updating its Android and iOS apps to enable native support for full-size landscape and portrait photos and video inside the app. They’ll run alongside the traditional square photos, which will remain the default for photos shared on Instagram.

When you access your photo gallery from within the updated app, you’ll now see a format button above the camera roll. You can use this button to toggle between square and full-size images. From there, you can zoom in and out to choose the best crop for your photos.

Initially, Instagram adopted square photos as a way of distinguishing itself from other photo-sharing apps. But they were also a practical choice. They helped provide a more consistent look as you scrolled down the feed, and they also looked better on smaller phone screens.

But as screen sizes have increased, and the platform has evolved to host more serious photography, the restrictive format has left many of the app’s 300 million monthly usersfrustrated. According to Instagram’s own research, 20 percent of uploaded photos have been modified to fit into the square frame, often using a third-party app that adds a “letterbox” effect to enable the sharing of landscape pictures. “For the average person, one in every five stories in their feed looks like it’s natively supported in our app,” says Ashley Yuki, an Instagram product manager. “Which is not great.”

Even as third-party apps like Square Sized and Squaready have gained popularity, they leave dead space on the edges of photos, making them smaller and harder to see. It can also be annoying and time-consuming to have to use a separate app to prep your photos beforehand.

Members of Instagram’s large fashion community will likely be among those celebrating the freedom this update brings, as will anyone who has experienced the trauma of having to choose whether to crop out either their new haircut or their new shoes. But square photos, as the signature of Instagram, will remain the default mode.

The update also unifies Instagram’s photo and video filters, so now any filter can be applied to your post regardless of its format. It will be available to both iOS and Android users today.

Source

Every Month 1.39 Billion People connect on Facebook, 700M on WhatsApp and 300M on Instagram!

Facebook’s efforts on smaller screens are paying off big.

More than half a billion Facebook users access the site only from mobile devices, Facebook revealed as part of an earnings presentation Wednesday. The social network has 1.19 billion total mobile monthly active users, as of the end of 2014, up 26% year-over-year.

All that mobile traffic has meant a big advertising windfall for Facebook. The company made $3.59 billion from advertising overall in the fourth quarter of 2014, and 69% of that came from mobile ads rather than their desktop cousins. That means Facebook made nearly $2.5 billion on mobile ads in three months—a 53% improvement year-over-year. It was also the first quarter Facebook’s mobile ad revenue beat the $2 billion mark.

Strong mobile numbers like these are vital for Facebook and other companies with ad-based business models. Internet users are increasingly flocking from browsing on PCs, where banner ads have long reigned, to using mobile browsers and apps, where traditional online ads haven’t worked as well.

Facebook and companies like it have been working hard to figure out how to adjust and make mobile ads that will actually click. The latest of Facebook’s mobile experiments is a platform launched in October that lets brands tap into the social giant’s vast troves of user data to advertise to Facebook users while they’re in other apps.

As an example, a Facebook user playing Candy Crush might get served up an in-game ad for toothpaste based on the user’s Facebook activity. Advertisers benefit from getting access to Facebook’s data, while Facebook increases its ad revenue without putting more ads on its own products. While Facebook’s fourth-quarter numbers are clearly evidence the company’s own mobile app is doing just fine, they’re also a sign this new network is off to a speedy start.

Rihanna’s Almost-Nude Cover Shoot For ‘Esquire UK’ Will Make Your Jaw Drop!

When Rihanna arrived back on Instagram this weekend, I was actually astounded time didn’t stop or a parade wasn’t immediately held in her honor (#rude). Despite this super disrespectful lack of public fanfare, badgalriri has been uploading photos left and right, from birthday parties, to her sick Halloween costume, to a sneak peak at her upcoming December cover for Elle magazine, which the mag described as “boldly stripped down.”

Well, it seems she’s also stripping down (way, way down) for the December cover of UKEsquire‘s ‘Food & Drink’ themed issue, and to say the spread is amazing would pretty much be the understatement of the century.

No, seriously. Look.

She uploaded a few other pictures from the spread, which was shot by famed fashion photog Ellen von Unwerth, and full disclosure—you might need a super strong fan or some ice water to get through the rest of it. Rihanna SLAYS.

 

BOOM!

Black and white pictures + a shower hose – clothing = Rihanna’s best spread eva, IMHO. If she was looking for a way to truly ring in the return of her reign over Instagram, these pictures straight up nailed it. Bless you, Rih-Rih, BLESS YOU.

Source