Rewin Koul's blog

Seems like Facebook is on an innovative spree these days. After adding the photo-as-comment feature, it has now moved to some drastic changes to its own popular photo-sharing app, Instagram.

In an urge to keep up with Twitter's growing video-sharing app, Vine, Facebook is adding video to Instagram.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said on Thursday that users will be able to record and share 15-second clips by tapping a video icon in the app. They can also apply filters to videos to add contrast, make them black and white or different hues.

"We need to do to video what we did to photos," Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said while unveiling Video On Instagram at a press event at Facebook's headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park. "This is the same Instagram we all know and love but it moves," he added.

Keeping up with Vine
Vine, which launched in January, has 13 million users and lets people create and share 6-second video clips. Instagram has 100 million users, up from 20 million when Facebook bought the company more than a year ago. If users like it, Facebook's move could propel mobile video sharing into the mainstream.

Instagram video apps tailored for iPhones and smartphones powered by Google-backed Android software feature 13 filters for special effects and post to people's Facebook pages the same way pictures do, according to Systrom.

Instagram engineers worked with leading video scientists to develop a "cinema" feature that stabilizes shaking that is typical in smartphone video.

How to use
To use the video feature, Instagram users can tap on the same camera icon they use to snap photos. A new video camera icon will appear on the right side. Tap it and a screen with a red video button will let you record clips of sunsets, kids running in parks or co-workers staring at their computer screens. The app will record as long as your finger is on the red button or for 15 seconds, whichever comes first.

Facebook acquired Instagram last year. The original price was pegged at $1 billion but the final value was less because of a decline in the social network's share price.

Twitter earlier this year launched Vine, a service that lets people share video snippets up to six seconds long.

It's going to be a neck-to-neck battle between the two networking giants. We as customers are are in for a treat.

In a rather bizarre news, Facebook servers seemed to have had a crash of some sorts, as the website was down for a few minutes this morning.

However, there is nothing to freak out folks, as the glitch has been resolved.

Users logging in to the social network, were taken aback when they were faced with an error message instead of the plethora of posts and invitations on their walls.

The site was down for about five minutes for some users, up to 10 minutes for others.

However it was resolved quickly and it was back providing respite to avid facebooker.

Facebook has apologized after its website went down, attributing the outage to an internal issue.

"Earlier today, an internal issue in our web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time," a Facebook spokesman told AAP.

"We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to 100 per cent. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Messages posted online, apparently linked to hacking group Anonymous, have claimed responsibility for attacking the site, but this has not been verified.

If the outage was orchestrated by Anonymous, it's possible it was an attack over Facebook's involvement in the US National Security Administration data-mining scandal.

The social network revealed last week it had received between 9000 and 10,000 user-data requests from US government entities.

BuzzFeed recently put together a summary of the Internet in 60 seconds, estimating that more than 208,000 photos were uploaded to Facebook and more than 1,875,000 posts were liked.

By that we infer that in the 5-10 minutes that passed without facebook, 1,041,500 photos have gone un-uploaded, and 9,375,000 posts went un-liked.
Sounds horrific, doesn't it?

Desperate Facebookers turned to Twitter to find out if the outage was affecting anyone else; with tweets ranging from the dramatic: "the end is near, Facebook is down." to the rather blunt: "While Facebook is down, all you're missing is that a friend you haven't seen since 3rd grade posted a new photo of her kids."

Seems like all we need nowadays is to let all our thoughts flow directly from our brains to the welcoming walls of facebook and twitter. Presumably the "world" is indeed coming to an end giving birth to another "virtual world".

Oh! I just got a notification.