Hey developers looking to build the next great Twitter supported service, did you hear that KABOOM in the distance?

We’re not talking any small bomb going off either, but rather an atom bomb size explosion – if the rumor being floated by Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch has any validity.

It seems, according to the post, that Twitter will be announcing, as soon as tomorrow, that they are going to be launching their own photosharing service effectively smacking other services like Twitpic and yFrog with what amounts to a body blow.

According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge on announcing its own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that).

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone,  as photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low hanging fruit.

Personally I am not the least surprised if this is indeed the case. For some time now I have been saying that anyone thinking of building a company on top of Twitter had better be developing something really niche because doing otherwise will be nothing more than an exercise in self-abuse.

It makes one wonder if developers are beginning to feel like idea machine for Twitter?

Twitter rumored to be launching photosharing service – Another shoe drops. is a post from: The Inquisitr

There you have it folks – our very first image of the planet Mercury courtesy of the good folks at NASA. From their post on Flickr about the image:

NASA Satellite MESSENGER Sends Back First Image of Mercury from Orbit

NASA image captured March 29, 2011

Early this morning, at 5:20 am EDT, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. The MESSENGER team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down.

The dominant rayed crater in the upper portion of the image is Debussy. The smaller crater Matabei with its unusual dark rays is visible to the west of Debussy. The bottom portion of this image is near Mercury’s south pole and includes a region of Mercury’s surface not previously seen by spacecraft.

Over the next three days, MESSENGER will acquire 1185 additional images in support of MDIS commissioning-phase activities. The year-long primary science phase of the mission will begin on April 4, and the orbital observation plan calls for MDIS to acquire more than 75,000 images in support of MESSENGER’s science goals.

On March 17, 2011 (March 18, 2011, UTC), MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. The mission is currently in its commissioning phase, during which spacecraft and instrument performance are verified through a series of specially designed checkout activities. In the course of the one-year primary mission, the spacecraft’s seven scientific instruments and radio science investigation will unravel the history and evolution of the Solar System’s innermost planet. Visit the Why Mercury? section of this website to learn more about the science questions that the MESSENGER mission has set out to answer.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Our first image of Mercury – it may not seem like much but it’s still cool is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you managed to pull yourself from what ever rock you like to hide away in to get away from the endless hype that happens in the tech blogosphere you might have heard of some new mobile photo-sharing sharing service called Color that managed to snag itself $41 million in first round funding.

I’m not even going to go into the whole insanity of any just popped up from stealth startup getting $41 million because that is just mind boggling when you consider Google didn’t even get half that much in its funding. What gets me though is the fact that anyone thinks that Colors is worth any amount of the hype it is getting, admittedly both gushing and not so gushing.

For those of you not familiar with what Color is the simple story it that it is a photo sharing app between you and those people around you in any given place that have Color installed on their smartphone. You don’t have to know any of the people either as the software will detect another smartphone and share any photos you have taken at that location with those unknown people and will share their’s with you.

As Frederic Lardinois at NewsGrange points out this “elastic social network” that lives for the time you and other Color users are in close proximity and shares all photos within that temporary location based social network

Here is what Colors does: Unlike apps like Instagram, picplz or Path, every picture you take is public and there is no option to make it private. More importantly, the app groups together both the photos that were taken at the same location and the people that took them. To do this, the service uses some admittedly smart algorithms that look at where your phone was pointing, the ambient noise around you and other factors to determine that these pictures were indeed taken in the same place. The service then organizes you into an “elastic” social network with all the people around you who took picture at the same place. It basically creates the social network for you as you use the app (and dissolves your “friendships” automatically if you don’t take pictures close to each other for a while).

My reaction when I read all that is being written about Color is – why?

Why would I want someone else’s; a person I don’t know from Adam, images of the same place mixed in with the I have taken pictures?

Why would I want to share my pictures, my memories, my special moments, shared with people I don’t know and will never ever see again?

Why is there some stupid assumption that this picture taking of special moments even needs to be socialized beyond the charing that we are doing on our blogs, on Facebook, or on Twitter. At least there we are making a conscious choice of whether our pictures we have taken are available for public consumption.

Color proposes to take that away because as Frederic points out every picture you take is public and instantly sharable to other people around you who have the app installed.

I realize that that the line between private and public is constantly being moved, with a real effort to remove it altogether, but idea is just plain stupid. It’s not revolutionary as some would have us believe. It is just another attempt to inundate the web with totally pointless images, except to those who took them.

Thankfully Color has one very large Achilles heel – in order for this idea to work it will require mass, and I mean mass, adoption and I honestly believe, regardless of the over sharing world we live in, that the critical mass Color’s will need to justify its stupid $41 million round of funding will never be reached.

Color Demo from Color Labs, Inc. on Vimeo.

Color me stupid but I don’t get Color is a post from: The Inquisitr

I realize that everyone is enamored with this whole location thing and just drooling over being able to share not only what they are doing but where they are doing it.

The only problem is, as we saw with the now shuttered PleaseRobMe site, that we seem to be losing an common sense as to exactly how potentially dangerous t his insane amount of sharing can be.

In our rush to share ad naseum we forget that there is information going along with that cute little check-in or photo we just uploaded. It is this danger that the site called I Can Stalk U is purporting to point out to the world.

The principal is pretty simple. Just about every single digital camera being sold has the ability to to add all kinds of data to the image (called EXIF metadata) and one of those pieces of data is what is termed as geotagging data. This means that the GPS location data of where you took the picture becomes part of that image’s metadata and with just a few lines of code that information can be read by anyone.

Using that information as their base developers Ben Jackson, Larry Pesce, and a security research team called Mayhemic Labs created the I Can Stalk U site. Using data from the public Twitter stream they separate out the messages that have images associated with them and then in apparently near real-time re-posts them to the I Can Stalk U site but edited to show the location data.

According to Sarah Perez the site developers justify doing this under the guise of it being a warning to people about just what they are really sharing.

The site’s authors explain that anyone, by analyzing your photos, could find out where you live, who else lives there, your commuting patterns, where you go for lunch, who you go with and more.

But who would be interested in all this data?

The developers say “anyone” – from “a government to a nosy neighbor.” That may sound a little tin foil hat to you, but there is some value in understanding the nature of geotagged and how it reveals your location when shared instantly via social networking sites. If you’re a high-profile person, like a celebrity or executive, for example, you may not want this information to be public. More importantly, perhaps, if you’re someone who’s been stalked in the past, or have a dangerous ex-significant other of some kind, you may also need to take additional precautions.

I get the warning people of the possible dangers of oversharing but personally I think this was the wrong way to go about it.

Wow! What a fantastic idea – show the world where you thanks to I Can Stalk U is a post from: The Inquisitr

via @edbott on Twitter and Suspect Device

It’s no wonder geeks get such a geeky reputation is a post from: The Inquisitr

Personally I wouldn’t have known about this if it wasn’t being written about by every single tech blog in the whole tech blogosphere since I am more than happy with Bing Image search for my needs; but appears that Google has decided the time had finally arrived to refresh that part of search.

As you can see from the top image I’m still getting the standard image search results but this is what the new results are suppose to look like once they rollout everywhere.

some of the features we are supposed to expect with the rollout are

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
• Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
• A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
• Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
• Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

As well Google will be rolling out a new feature that you will only see when doing images searches. Called Image Search Ads it will allow advertisers to include a thumbnail image along with your lines of ad text.

That should make for some interesting ads once the spammers and other low-life’s catch on.

Oh lookie – Google Images gets a re-vamp is a post from: The Inquisitr

When selecting somewhere to take pictures I don’t think that a graveyard would be at the top of the list. Yet these eight images from a larger collection over at Fresh Pics are thought and beautiful moments in time captured by talented photographers.

I still wouldn’t be caught dead taking photos in a graveyard at night but during the day .. well maybe.

8 Beautiful photographs of graveyards is a post from: The Inquisitr

One warning: be ready to scroll down… a lot as the original size of t his monster is 700px x 1o,000px. It turns out though that the file was too big to upload so I had to resize it to 500px x 7,143px.

(hat tip to My Modern Metropolis)

Humongous yet awesome image done in .. are you ready .. MSPaint is a post from: The Inquisitr

At this point they have managed to get 2 million images stored into the archives and to celebrate they have launched a special page for the growing collection. As well you can append “source:life” to any of your Google images searches so that the results will include photos from the magazine.

Far more than their questionable book scanning project I think this joint project between Google and Time LIFE is a great idea with my only concern being how others will be able to use them. I looked around but I couldn’t find anything regarding republishing them as parts of other works. hopefully that will get cleared up soon.

2 million Life photographs now on Google Images is a post from: The Inquisitr