Camera, Facebook's brand new photo sharing app, is built to do precisely the same thing as its wildly popular stepsister, but it feeds directly into Facebook rather than into Instagram's walled garden, population 40 million and growing. It may not officially have Instagram DNA, but Facebook Camera offers up a palette of 14 filters to please any budding mobile photog, though they sport more literal labels ("Neon" and "Golden") than in Instagram's own moody toolkit.

Tinker with your photo (you know you want to crop it into a square, go ahead), apply a filter to set the tone, tag a friend and send it straight to Facebook. Like Instagram photos on Facebook, it'll appear on your Timeline at full-width - and fast. Facebook Camera, which was built independently of Kevin Systrom and co., runs circles around the regular Facebook app in terms of speed and navigability. If you mainly use Facebook to share photos with friends, Facebook Camera is a sleek, lightweight way to beam your pictures to the social network - but it's no Instagram.

Or Is It?

Facebook Camera takes more than a few cues from the photo sharing service we all know and love, but it's got a leg up with that whole 90-plus-million-strong active userbase. But why did Facebook make its very own Instagram at all? Facebook has been building this app for the better part of a year, since well before it successfully put the moves on Instagram. In fact, at least some photo filter features were ready to roll last August, according to engineers involved with the project.

Facebook couldn't just sit on its hands while Instafever spread like so much Toaster-tinted wildfire. As the company made a move for the photo sharing app, it was smart to develop its own in parallel - it certainly has the resources to do so. Facebook Camera was insurance that the king of social won't look like a lumbering giant next to the hot photo filtering craze that has all the social media whippersnappers in a tizzy. Instagram innovated, and gave us something we didn't know we needed until there we were, huddled over an iPhone screen tweaking a teensy square photo with the zeal of a less digital artist. As ReadWriteWeb Editor-at-Large Dan Frommer puts it, "Facebook bought Instagram because it’s doing something new and different that’s special; because it represented the biggest existing threat to Facebook." It wanted to assure us that, as the true sovereign of social, it can meet the evolving needs of its vast kingdom - there's no need to let our eyes wander.

Is Facebook's new app Insta-redundant? The polished little in-house photo app - which was developed independently of the Instagram team - must have been burning a hole in Facebook's pocket. And the company might as well siphon off Instagrammers while it watches the clock - they'll all end up in the same place anyhow.

Beyond Instagram, Facebook Camera also throws some elbows in the direction of Google+'s slick photo features. Google+ is still floundering when it comes to engaging users, but the site has a dedicated base of photogs who enjoy tools like Instant Upload and the large lightbox photo view, which Facebook mixed into its own recipe in February.

Camera isn't Facebook's only spinoff app. Last year it released Messenger, another service that serves its purpose far better than the Facebook app itself. Just like with the ill-fated Pool Party and the advent of Google+, there likely isn't room for two.

It's hard to say what Facebook will do with its new set of photo sharing nesting dolls. Once the Instagram buy goes through (assuming it's smooth sailing), the social giant will have the choice of integrating the two, or deep sixing one altogether. And after Instagram's loyalist outcry, it'd be wise to handle both the popular product and the brand with kid gloves. May the best-loved app win.

David Clarke is CEO and co-founder of BGT Partners, a 2011 and 2010 Ad Age Best Place to Work in the U.S. BGT creates interactive marketing and technology solutions for global corporations that strengthen brands, develop more engaging relationships and transform businesses.

With increased competition for ad dollars, Twitter is making a big push this year to become more attractive to advertisers. It has invested in a redesign, as well as brand pages, but that may not be all the social network plans to unveil.

According to a recent Ad Age report, the company is looking to add new experiences to its platform, in the hopes that the move will entice brands to spend more ad dollars.

Although Twitter hasn’t officially confirmed these rumors, it’s worth taking them seriously. See below for the three possible changes, and what each could mean for brands.

SEE ALSO: 6 Successful Twitter Hashtag Campaigns

1. Open Platform

Facebook and Apple transformed their businesses by opening their platforms to third-party developers. The move allowed independent developers to create new ways for consumers to engage with brands. As a result, we now have multi-million dollar businesses built around these apps.

If the rumors are right, Twitter is heading in the same direction by opening its platform to developers.

An open Twitter platform would allow brands to create deeper interactions with consumers through custom experiences. This would not only be an opportunity for developers, but also for brands — especially those with strong Twitter presences. For example, if you’re using Twitter as a customer service channel, then a customer service app could potentially streamline the way you handle customer support.

That said, apps on Twitter will face inherent challenges. The Twitter stream is the main attraction, and most people don’t visit brand pages directly. Plus, popular Twitter browsers such as TweetDeck and HootSuite are built around the Twitter stream, which deals another blow to the power of brand pages. Perhaps custom apps can find a way to drive more traffic to brand pages, but it seems doubtful.

2. T-Commerce

Social commerce was hailed as the next big thing in ecommerce. Several brands developed ecommerce integration on the Facebook platform, hoping people would want to purchase while on Facebook, but it never really took off. Gap, JC Penny, and Nordstrom closed down their Facebook shops because customers preferred to shop on the main websites. This probably had more to do with the poor Facebook ecommerce user experience than with Facebook itself. Most of these early f-commerce attempts were simply developed without an understanding of how Facebook could add value to the shopping experience.

Now, Twitter is rumored to try its luck with social ecommerce for brand pages. Will it be successful?

Fundamentally Twitter has to succeed where Facebook failed. Twitter ecommerce, or t-commerce, has to create a significant added value to make it more compelling than shopping from a traditional web store.

It’s likely that Twitter’s ecommerce solution will include a deep integration with Square, the mobile payment company Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey established in 2009. It’s possible that t-commerce will be a mobile-only service that uses location-based technology and one-click payments with your Twitter name. That would add significant value to Twitter’s mobile user base, especially when you consider that 50% of Twitter’s users are accessing Twitter on mobile devices.

3. Contests and Sweepstakes

Lastly, Twitter is rumored to introduce contests and sweepstakes for brand pages to create deeper brand engagement. That said, brands have been pushing contests and sweepstakes on Twitter for some time, and given the viral capabilities available with retweeting and hashtags, it will continue to happen.

Will an official change by Twitter be groundbreaking? Probably not, but it’s likely that these changes will allow brands to more efficiently manage and execute campaigns on this social network.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, matspersson0

What kind of revenue numbers would justify Pinterest’s $200 million valuation? Atlantic writer Alexis Madrigal and others have used back-of-the-envelope math to explain this valuation. In his article, “Why Pinterest Is Playing Dumb About Making Money,” Madrigal puts Pinterest’s annual revenue at $45 million a year. Based on statistical modeling, I believe there is only a .25 percent chance that Pinterest is making that much money.

Considering all possible scenarios — not just the most optimistic ones — let me show you why and how much Pinterest earns.

Madrigal calculates Pinterest revenue from its only known source — affiliate fees from SkimLinks. “So, Pinterest has 10 million users,” writes Madrigal. “Let’s say that the average across all of them is that they buy items valued at $10 in a month through affiliate links on Pinterest. That’s $100,000,000 of sales for which Pinterest would get credit. That’s $3.75 million in monthly revenue, or $45 million of annual revenue.”

There are two problems with this calculation. One, no one verified whether Pinterest generates enough traffic to generate 10 million transactions per month. Two, revenue numbers based on broad assumptions have uncertainties that are not quantifiable. For example, how likely is it that each user is generating $10 a month?

Let’s look at the first problem. What kind of traffic should Pinterest generate to websites to deliver 10 million transactions per month? According to the Top 500 Guide: Profiles and Statistics of America’s 500 Largest Retail Web Sites Ranked by Annual Sales, the average conversion rate of website visits to sales is 4.3 percent. That means Pinterest must garner 232 million visits to result in 10 million transactions.

How does that compare to total traffic to all online stores? Data collected by Complete says online stores receive a total of 662 million visits a week, or 1,434 million visits a month. This means that in order to justify Madrigal’s estimates, Pinterest must account for 16.1 percent of all online retail traffic. That’s a tall order. According to Shareaholic, Pinterest only drives 3.6 percent of referral traffic. It is safe to say that Madrigal’s numbers grossly overestimate Pinterest’s page views, transactions, and hence its revenues.

Regarding the second problem with revenue models based on assumptions, let me clarify that it is not possible to avoid assumptions when it comes to privately held companies. However, we can start with smaller, more granular and better assumptions, and we can use statistical models to quantify the uncertainties in them. Instead of making such assumptions as 10 million transactions per month and $10 average transaction size, let’s build out a model from its components.

Sales from Pinterest links = Number of transactions/year X number of active users X transaction size

Pinterest revenue = Sales from Pinterest links  X percentage of affiliate fees

Each variable in these two equations are unknowns that must be estimated. Instead of assuming an average value for these numbers, we estimate the low and high values that we’re 90 percent confident about.  To be 90 percent confident about an estimate, we need to have a low and high value such that there is only 10 percent chance that the real value falls outside of the range.

Here are the numbers I used based on my research.

90 percent confident	Low	High
Number of transactions per user per year	1	18
Number of active users	1,000,000	5,000,000
Sales per transaction	$2	$18
Affiliate fee %	2%	4%

(Note: Pinterest has more than 10 million registered users. I generously estimated that they have one million to five million active users who click on product links and make at least one to 18 purchases a year.)

There are two advantages to this approach. First, we are estimating many smaller numbers. And secondly, we are quantifying our uncertainty in our estimates. As we gain more information about any one of the components, we can refine the estimates.

Once we have this range for each component, then we can calculate Pinterest’s revenue numbers using a statistical modeling method called the Monte Carlo method. It’s like imagining living your life 10,000 times to find out how many different lives have certain outcomes. For Pinterest, we’re trying to discover how many different scenarios yield different revenue numbers.

The results are stunning:

1. Thirty-three percent chance Pinterest makes more than $10 million a year
2. Twenty-five percent chance it makes more than $12 million a year
3. One percent chance it makes more than $36 million a year
4. Less than .25 percent chance it makes the $45 million number quoted by Madrigal
5. Considering all possible scenarios, the expected value of its revenue is just $9 million.

A $200 million valuation based on high revenue numbers that have such a low chance of being true is a risky bet. Clearly, the VC firms focused on the most optimistic scenario — regardless of its chances — and didn’t account for the entire spectrum of scenarios. But that’s business as usual in the Valley.

Rags Srinivasan is a management professional who specializes in strategic marketing. He recently published, “To Group Coupon or Not,” and he blogs at Iterative Path and tweets at @rags. 

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user Mykl Roventine.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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Full story at We are social.

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It's just amazing how people can use a Location based website to their interests.

Since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, different forms of media have played a critical role in the spread of revolutionary thought and in bringing about political, economic and social change.

During the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ first steps were to seize the telephone exchange, the railway stations and the main bridges going in and out of Petrograd, the capital of the Russian Empire. This allowed them to control the message about the revolution and to prevent counter-revolutionary propaganda. They then used the wireless room of a loyal warship to broadcast messages appealing to the Russian people to support the revolution.

More related to this story

• What direction our own democracy?
• The easy part of the revolution
• Lessons from a revolution (Iran’s, that is)

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During the 1979 Iranian revolution, a popular uprising similar to the ones we are witnessing today in Tunisia and Egypt, revolutionary ideas were spread through “small media” such as audio cassettes and printed leaflets that carried the messages of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini.

Authoritarian states, to preserve their control and to stifle opposition, have gone to great lengths to control the mass media, with a great deal of success in recent decades. But the emergence of social media – Web 2.0 – has presented a major challenge to the state’s ability to control the message and contain popular dissent.

The Tunisian and Egyptian governments’ censorship and media controls, not to mention their repressive restrictions on free speech and political association, could do little to prevent enterprising youths from organizing the initial demonstrations that would unleash upheaval in both countries. Short of shutting off the Internet and mobile phone communications, these states have been unable to contain the viral anti-regime activities of their wired citizens.

Facebook and Twitter certainly aren’t solely responsible for the growing wave of revolutionary ferment in the Arab world; pent-up frustrations had been bubbling for some time. But they helped to channel that frustration into action. The first major demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were organized via Facebook and Twitter, with activist leaders directing followers where to congregate and how to avoid blockades. Those gatherings then snowballed, drawing in citizens from all walks of life.

So what does this mean for Western democracy promotion efforts? Western states need not lecture repressed populations about the value of freedom or guide them in the building of democratic movements. Events in Egypt, Tunisia and even the 2009 post-election protests in Iran have shown that the focus of Western efforts needs to be on strengthening the Web 2.0 platforms that can facilitate the networking of activists, the sharing of ideas and the organization of movements.

Although many authoritarian regimes have been caught flat-footed by the emergence of social media and their political applications, others have been ahead of the game. China, for instance, has developed sophisticated cyber-control strategies that have included strikes against organizations such as Google that challenge that control.

Those seeking to defy such efforts by states like China must focus their efforts on keeping the Web 2.0 political space open, whether through technological innovation or by leveraging economic and political power to persuade regimes, corporations and private organizations to cease interference in free virtual expression.

There are more than 500 million Facebook and 200 million Twitter members in the world today, and the number is growing, particularly in the developing world. In fact, social networking is the Web communication medium of choice in the developing world, with those who are wired typically spending more time on social networking sites than e-mail. Chinese bloggers, for instance, are the most prolific in the world, despite increasingly stringent government controls.

There were revolutions, of course, before Facebook and Twitter, and most of the world’s population, particularly its poor and disenfranchised (those most in need of revolutionary change), still lack access to the Web. Nevertheless, the situations in Tunisia and Egypt have clearly shown the revolutionary potential of Web 2.0.

If Western states are serious about democracy promotion, they must work to harness this potential. This will require continued investment for innovation in social media technologies and the political will to keep them open and free at all costs. It will also require more openness among Western states themselves – which, in the era of WikiLeaks, may encounter some resistance. Like the printing press, radio and television, social media are evolving into a powerful tool to mobilize people and to promote positive political change. Let’s not miss the opportunity to use it.

Mark Sedra, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, teaches at the University of Waterloo.

Even the most technically proficient employees will likely be passed over for that promotion if they can't work well in small groups or lead a meeting of fellow staff. Those who do manage to get ahead likely possess emotional intelligence, a measure of how well a person can regulate his or her own emotions, as well as the emotions of other people.

Emotional intelligence has remained a sticky subject in the years since it served as the title of Daniel Goleman's 1995 book. In this article, we'll take a look at the role emotional intelligence might play in predicting the likelihood of falling victim to depression, dementia and other brain disorders.

Full article at HowStuffWorks.com.

Total aggregation of HowStuffWorks.com.

Photo credit: Fotolia

Does the thought of being cut off from social media cause you to break out in a cold sweat? When the fire alarm goes off, do you grab your phone before the cat? Chances are it’s time for an intervention, but Pam Moore is here to let you know the signs.

1. You more often than not talk in 140 character increments.

2. You forgot how to spell simple 3 letter words like “you” which you now reference as “U”.

3. You go to the mall for an hour and come home with 10 new blog ideas.

4. The grocery store clerk, mailman, dry cleaner, and Panera Bread head cook all know your twitter handle.

5. You have a favorite seat at Starbucks and Panera bread.

6. You have stayed past closing at least two times at either Panera Bread or Starbucks.

7. You can’t remember the last time you went to the restroom without your Android or iPhone.

8. You regularly sit down in front of your desk first thing in the morning while still wearing your jammies, to “send a few tweets” and then hit the gym. Unfortunately you’re usually still there at lunch time.

9. You are the mayor of Panera Bread, Starbucks, the grocery story, drycleaner and your favorite burger joint.

10. You refuse to do drive by FourSquare as you want to earn your badges the old school way!

11. Your kids know the difference between a twit and a tweet.

12. Your kids could easily describe a retweet, mention, hootsuite, and ping.fm to their friends who have parents who don’t tweet.

13. Your spouse has threatened to divorce you if you don’t leave your cell phone at home at least one date night a month.

14. You have real friends in Australia, the UK, Brazil and at least three other countries. You met them all on Twitter.

15. You know many of your Twitter pals better than you do some neighbors.

Full list at The Marketing Nut.

A love affair with social media.