GOOGLE MAKES PHOTOVINE OFFICIAL; LAUNCHING LATER THIS MONTH

Were you all jazzed up and ready to plant your first Photovine, only to have those gardening dreams crushed by a barren three page teaser? El Goog's Slide team isn't quite ready for you to grab that spade, but it is willing to transcribe your digits for the service's soft launch later this month. Judging by the brief demo, vines begin like a game of photo-sharing telephone: what starts as an innocent photograph of a "warm and fuzzy" pup, can easily transcend into friends sharing an equally snug and furry man. Sound like a party? See the video below.

GOOGLE TO LAUNCH PHOTO SHARING SITE PHOTOVINE

Back on June 7th, Google filed a USPTO application for the name Photovine, sending sparks flying down the, er, grapevine about a possible photo-sharing program. The application cites a service dedicated to the "transmission of visual images and data by telecommunications networks, wireless communication networks, the Internet, information services networks and data networks." Unsurprisingly, it looks like the internet giant's also picked up the corresponding domain name.

LEAK: TWITTER TO ANNOUNCE PHOTO SHARING SERVICE THIS WEEK

Twitter will announce a photo-sharing service at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., this week, according to sources familiar with the matter. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is set to speak at D9 on Wednesday. Twitter spokespeople did not reply for a request for comment on the matter.

Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets. Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.

FACEBOOK RETAINS PICTURES UP TO 16 MONTHS AFTER DELETION

Ever find a really embarrassing picture of yourself on Facebook?  Did you click the delete link and think "wow, I'm glad that's gone"?  Well, it may not really be gone.  It can take up to 16 months for that embarrassing picture to be deleted from Facebook's servers.  Facebook explains "For all practical purposes, the photo no longer exists, and we wouldn't be able find it if we were asked or even compelled to do so," Facebook spokesperson Simon Axten told Ars via e-mail this week. "This is similar to what happens when you delete information from the hard drive of your computer."

Except, your computer hard drive isn't indexed by Google,Yahoo and many other search engines (at least not yet anyway), cached in browser histories and scraped and archived by hackers.  Facebook needs to make "delete" actually mean "delete" and make it instant, not almost a year and a half later. [Gizmodo]

HIGHER RESOLUTION PHOTOS COMING TO FACEBOOK

Facebook photos have been notoriously poor quality.  Between the extremely high compression and very low resolution, that cute baby picture you upload is reduced to a blurry postage stamp.  Over the next few weeks Facebook will begin rolling out support for high resolution pictures.  According to Facebook

We’re increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge, for an 8 times increase overall. I’m really excited to be launching this feature. To see the quality of these pictures, you can view National Geographic’s “Top-Rated Your Shot Photos (September)” album or Sports Illustrated’s “Football Across America” album. Download high-resolution photos by clicking the “Download” link.


While this won't apply to any pictures already on Facebook, any pictures you upload after the new system is in place will have the new specs.  But Facebook isn't done with just that announcement.  They will also be launching a light-box interface similar to Flickr.