Apple is reportedly preparing an upgrade to its iCloud service that includes new photo-sharing features, according The Wall Street Journal. The publication cites multiple anonymous sources who claim the Cupertino-based company will announce the new features at its Worldwide Developer Conference beginning on June 11th. Users can currently store and sync photos using iCloud, however the upgrades will allow users to share and comment on each other’s photos as well. The iPhone-maker is also said to be working on a new feature that will allow iCloud users to sync their personal videos to the cloud, and the update will reportedly also let users access “Notes” and “Reminders” through the iCloud web portal. Apple has not refreshed iCloud since it launched last October, and the service is currently home to more than 125 million users.

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Social networking giant Facebook is reportedly set to make its initial public offering on May 18th, a day later than earlier reports had claimed. Company co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief financial officer David Ebersman will take part in a roadshow beginning on Monday that will see the company host a number of meetings to pitch its stock to investors, The Wall Street Journal reports. An offering will then be made on May 18th, the report claims. Facebook’s IPO could raise a much as $10 billion and value the company at as much as $100 billion, making it the largest Internet IPO in history. Google’s 2004 offering currently holds the record at $1.9 billion. Facebook will be listed on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol FB.

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Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram has had a great impact on the photo-sharing app’s popularity. Despite public outcry with some users looking to delete their accounts, Instagram continues to add users by the millions. The media coverage has benefited the company greatly and on Tuesday evening, Instagram became the N0. 1 free app in Apple’s App Store for the first time ever. The company recently revealed that it had surpassed 30 million users on the iPhone, and combined with the success of the Android version and Facebook’s user base, it won’t be long until the photo-sharing app surpasses 50 million users and beyond.

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After being greeted with mixed reactions, millions of users have warmed up to Facebook’s new layout, dubbed Timeline. The new face of Facebook places all of a user’s interactions with the social network on the profile page in reverse chronological order, giving friends a single destination with infinite scrolling on which they can observe all status updates, photos, wall posts and more. While Facebook tried its best to make the transition an easy one, the company said in January that the slow march to making Timeline a requirement was underway. As of Friday, Timeline is no longer an option and those users who have not already made the switch will be forced to do so.

UPDATE: A Facebook spokesperson contacted BGR to clarify that only Pages are being updated today. Timeline for profile pages are still being rolled out and there is no concrete date for when the mandatory changeover will take place.

A proposed amendment to FCC legislation that would have prevented current or potential employers from seeking access to employee Facebook accounts was shot down by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. The amendment was put forth by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, and it was defeated 236 to 184 with only one republican voting in favor of the change. “Nothing in this Act or any amendment made by this Act shall be construed to limit or restrict the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a rule or to amend an existing rule to protect online privacy, including requirements in such rule that prohibit licensees or regulated entities from mandating that job applicants or employees disclose confidential passwords to social networking web sites,” the proposed amendment read. Other legislation is currently being considered on federal and state levels that would prevent companies from demanding usernames and passwords in order to access employee social network accounts.

[Via TechCrunch]

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It isn’t uncommon for companies to scan through the Internet looking for information on potential hires. Young job seekers, however, have found ways to avoid having prying eyes find private data by applying a wide-range of privacy settings to their Facebook accounts. Now, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday that numerous employers are asking potential hires to hand over login credentials to their email accounts, social networking websites and other online services. The ACLU immediately blasted the practice, calling it “an invasion of privacy” and insisting that “people are entitled to their private lives.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal echoed these concerns and is now drafting a bill to make such actions illegal. Read on for more.

The Connecticut Democrat spoke with Politico and said such requests from potential employers are an “unreasonable invasion of privacy.” Like other banned employment practices such as administering polygraph tests to screen applicants, Blumenthal believes that requiring access to a person’s private accounts should be illegal. “I am very deeply troubled by the practices that seem to be spreading voraciously around the country,” Blumenthal said, adding that an “employer has a lot of ways to find out information” about potential new employees.

While state regulators begin to examine the issue, Blumenthal said that he is drafting legislation that will be ready “in the very near future” to outlaw such practices. The bill would not prevent businesses from searching for what is publicly available about applicants, of course.

Exactly six years ago Wednesday, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey published the first post on his new service Twttr. “Just setting up my twttr,” Dorsey wrote in his brief note. No one knew at the time, but his tweet was the first of trillions of messages that would be posted to the social networking service over the coming six years. Twitter has seen more than 532 million accounts registered in its six years, and the service is used around the world by people in all walks of life. While some still view Twitter as a wasteland packed with irrelevant minutiae, the service is also used by tens of millions of people and organizations as a means of communication and promotion. Twitter has even played an integral role for groups looking to organize in protest against oppressive regimes. Twitter announced on its blog Wednesday that the service is now home to more than 140 million active users who post an average of 340 million tweets per day. As of about a year ago, four months after Twitter celebrated its fifth birthday, the company confirmed that it was delivering an average of 350 million tweets each day.

Angry Birds for Facebook has launched one day ahead of schedule according to NewsCore. The wildly popular game has been in development for more than a year and was supposed to make its debut Tuesday. Instead, the hotly anticipated title launched late on Monday. The Facebook variant features the same game play as the original mobile app along with added social components, new power-ups and exclusive new levels. The game itself is free to play, with a 20-use power up costing $1. Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 500 million times and is reportedly played by 130 million individuals on a daily basis.

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Yesterday it was revealed that the popular social networking app Path was uploading entire iPhone address books to the company’s server. The data uploaded included full names, phone numbers and email addresses, and the app uploaded all this data without ever asking for permission. Dave Morin, Path’s co-founder and CEO, admitted fault on Wednesday through the company’s website and announced an update to allow users to either opt in or out of the contact collection feature. “We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words,” Morin said. “So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.” The company maintains that when data is transmitted to its servers, it is always sent securely through an encrypted connection and protected by industry-standard firewalls.

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A recent study showed that social networks like Twitter and Facebook are potentially more addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, and now we may have an idea why. A group of scientists from MIT in Massachusetts, IULM University in Milan and two other laboratories in Italy found that people showed physical and psychophysiological responses while using Facebook similar to those exhibited by people while playing a musical instrument or engaging in other creative activities. Beyond wanting to use Facebook for obvious reasons such as keeping up with friends and sharing photos, people may actually be seeking out the chemical responses they experience while browsing social networks. Read on for more.

The team of scientists measured skin conductance, blood volume pulse, electroencephalogram, electromyography, respiratory activity and pupil dilation in 30 subjects as they viewed photos of nature, attempted to solve math problems and then as they browsed Facebook. The results showed a clear psychophysiological pattern.

“Statistical analysis of the psychophysiological data and pupil dilation indicates that the Facebook experience was significantly different from stress and relaxation on many linear and spectral indices of somatic activity,” the group’s report states. “Moreover, the biological signals revealed that Facebook use can evoke a psychophysiological state characterized by high positive valence and high arousal (Core Flow State).”

As a result, the scientists hypothesize that the rapid growth being seen among big social networks can be attributed at least in part to positive physical and psychophysiological responses users experience while browsing sites like Facebook.

Path, the popular social network that competes with the likes of Instagram, may be uploading your iPhone’s entire address book up to its servers. Arun Thampi from mclov.in noticed the Path app’s steal data dump while trying to create a Mac OS X application for the social network during a hackathon. “Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path,” Thampi said, noting that Path didn’t ever ask for permission to do so. It’s unclear why Path is uploading the iPhone’s entire address book, but Thampi noticed that the social network performs the action during an API call with basic HTTP authentication. It remains unclear if Path’s Android application is also guilty of uploading personal information. Thampi has instructions on how to catch Path in the action on his blog.

UPDATE: A response from Path’s CEO follows after the break.

Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin
Co-Founder and CEO of Path

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A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices. Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported by participants. The results of the team’s study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, however preliminary data provided to The Guardian suggests the highest rate of “self-control failures” were tied to social media services.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

President Obama will be hosting his first Google+ hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. In the discussion, the president will be answering questions that were submitted over the past few weeks through YouTube. Google maintains that the White House has had no role in which questions will be selected. Google’s team will instead choose the top-rated questions among those submitted, ensuring there will be several different issues discussed. The event will take place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and is scheduled to last 45 minutes. The hangout will also be streamed on the White House’s web site, and reporters and press cameras not permitted inside during the event. Obama has previously hosted town hall meetings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of which received harsh criticism and claims that the President ignored subjects that drew the most questions.

Read [Google+] Read [CNN]

Facebook announced on Tuesday that the company’s Timeline feature will be forced on users “over the next few weeks.” Facebook introduced the Timeline feature last year, which transforms a profile page into a timeline of a user’s life, highlighting photos, posts and life events that help tell the user’s story. Once activated, people will have seven days to preview the Timeline content before it goes live on the account. Last week, Facebook added a feature that enabled apps to populate timelines with new information, such as a virtual passport to share a user’s favorite locations.

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Motorola Mobility announced on Wednesday that its Motorola Mobility Ventures arm has invested in a social networking startup called Shaker. The firm, based in Israel, says its social network is “similar to interacting in the physical world,” and that it “creates a natural setting using your Facebook profile and allows people to meet around mutual friends and shared interests.” Motorola’s MOTOBLUR user interface found on several of its Android smartphones allows users to access multiple social network profiles, but early versions weren’t greeted warmly by users. Motorola may use Shaker to spice things up a bit in future versions of the UI. “Shaker’s innovative platform gives consumers the ability to not only interact with each other, but with brands in groundbreaking ways that could never before have been accomplished on a social network,” Mony Hassid, managing director of Motorola Mobility Ventures, said. It is unclear how much Motorola Mobility Ventures invested in Shaker. A full press release follows after the break.

Motorola Mobility Ventures Invests in Shaker

Award-winning start-up specializes in evolving social networking experiences

Jan. 18, 2012

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – Jan. 18, 2012 – Motorola Mobility, Inc. (NYSE: MMI), through its strategic investment arm Motorola Mobility Ventures, today announced that it has invested in Shaker, the award-winning start-up that recreates social experiences online.

For the first time, Shaker allows people to socialize in a casual and fun way online. Similar to interacting in the physical world, Shaker creates a natural setting using your Facebook profile and allows people to meet around mutual friends and shared interests. Currently, the Israeli-based start-up’s offering is only available to users in Israel. Shaker is planning to launch in the United States in the first quarter of 2012, and has recently opened offices in New York and San Francisco.

“Shaker is the next step in social networking online,” said Mony Hassid, managing director, Motorola Mobility Ventures. “Shaker’s innovative platform gives consumers the ability to not only interact with each other, but with brands in groundbreaking ways that could never before have been accomplished on a social network.”

“As more people start using social media sites on their smart phones, Motorola Mobility offers us exciting support and expertise to expand on all platforms,” said Yonatan Maor, co-founder and CEO of Shaker. “Motorola Mobility’s support will enable Shaker to offer an amazing experience across all devices.”

Shaker won the prestigious Startup Battlefield contest at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2011, and announced $15 million Series A funding a few weeks later.