Photobucket Revamps To Rival Social Sharing Photo And Video Sites

Photobucket has just revealed a vastly made-over user experience for its online photo service, which has usually functioned as a photo depository of sorts. The company says it's reacting to a recent survey it conducted which quizzed people about their digital habits--two thirds said they were disorganized in managing their digital pics and 83% said they'd like a solution. Thus the Photobucket revamp is intended to make it much easier to back up, share, and organize digitally stored photos and videos.

The company also revealed that it'll be launching a new Photobucket Stories feature in September, designed to be a way to curate the videos and photos you store in the service into a more narrative format. The idea is to combine text and imagery into a sort of 21st century photo album, so that you can share, for example, media from your recent vacation with friends in a more structured way than via a simple online album or via updates on Facebook.

Photobucket, which has previously been used for personal photo storage and for tricks like storing avatars for use on other online services, is reacting to the rise of services like Instagram and Viddy, which are, along with Facebook, changing how we share digital media online and which create de facto social networks as part of their sharing abilities. One key differentiator of Photobucket is that it's offering the ability to edit your media, but to preserve the original content in the database. This is similar to the way photo editing suites like Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture work, and reinforces that Photobucket also works as a digital "locker" to securely store your images.

Photobucket has been in the news recently for a more controversial reason, where hackers used a relatively simple trick to access sexually charged images stored in some user's online lockers and then share them online. The company noted a very small number of users were affected and has reacted by protecting all new uploads with a scrambled URL to prevent snooping.

Gift Cards To Google Play Are On Their Way

Google is creating a plastic, pocketable links to the digital wares it sells in its Google Play store. Android Central has photo evidence of prototypes of Google's newest creations--cling-wrapped gift cards worth $10 and $25--which can be traded in for books, apps, movies and music.

With its Play gift cards, Google is following a path first cleared in a big way by Apple when it started selling iTunes gift cards for music and movies, and eventually, apps. This year, Apple replaced its traditional back-to-school iPod giveaway with iTunes gift card this season. If you are heading to school or college and bought a Mac, you got $100 in credit to spend at the iTunes store. This last quarter, the iTunes store generated $1.9 billion in revenue for Apple according to Bloomberg, and Apple is steadily growing access to iTunes and its media sharing features to countries outside the U.S.

The Play gift cards would give people a bit of nudge to spend at the Google Play store, sure. But the gift cards could make the Play store more visible, if the cards were made as readily available as those iconic neon iTunes cards, and seen at every grocery store and Best Buy. But that's not it for Google. Word is, a "Wish List" feature, as seen on Amazon, is on the way as well.

Instagram Homes In On Mapping With Version 3.0

Instagram is releasing version 3.0 of its photo app today, and it improves on the browsing experience in several significant ways.

The boldest new feature is called "Photo Maps." All the photos you geotagged before posting them on Instagram? Photo Map collects those and pins them on an interactive world map. This is by no means a revolutionary interface--apps from Foursquare to Yelp offer something similar, and even iPhoto lets you sort images by location. But by automatically creating location-specific photo albums that can be seen by friends, Instagram has put a new twist on the feature. The maps are turned off by default, making it a privacy-friendly opt-in program. When you activate it, you can choose individual photos that do and don't appear on the map, and even edit your preferences later. Photo maps are accessed through a user's profile page, making it easy for friends to see one another's favorite stomping grounds.

You can see our trigger-happy social media editor Anjali Mullany's photographs from all over Manhattan in her Photo Map view below.

Compared to that, my Photo Map is sparser, because I tend to geotag only a few of the Instagram photos I take

I'm not alone, it turns out. According to the New York Times, not more than 25 percent of Instagram users geotag their photographs. This update looks like a bid to get Instagrammers to geotag more frequently in the future. A trove of mobile location data could prove quite valuable to the startup that was acquired by Facebook in April.

There are a few other new tricks in Instagram's update today. The photos can now be displayed in a 3-across grid rather than a vertical river for faster browsing. The upload screen has a larger text box, making it easier to write captions. No need to tap the "load more" button, the app now offers infinite scrolling that loads as you go. And to better combat spam and abuse, individual comments can be reported and deleted in one action.

When Fast Company put Instagram founder Kevin Systrom on the Most Creative People In Business list in 2011, he said, "We think about photos like, 'This is your tweet, this is your status update.'" And now it can be your image-based homing beacon too.