Tag Archives: Social Media

Instagram Now Offers Direct Messaging

inInstagram is now more than just a place to share pictures with your followers. You can now directly send pictures to designated users. When Instagram released the ability to share videos it was clear that they were willing to compete with other social media platforms such as vine. Now with direct photo messaging they are just one step further in competing with new social media platforms. Instagram released a statement on their blog, “There are, however, moments in our lives that we want to share, but that will be the most relevant only to a smaller group of people—an inside joke between friends captured on the go, a special family moment or even just one more photo of your new puppy. Instagram Direct helps you share these moments.”

Instagram has clearly attracted a large audience and many young teens are turning to Instagram instead of Facebook or Twitter. Instagram has really offered a unique way of visual communication.  Now with direct messaging users can easily share photos by looking up the user. Instagram has put a button on the upper right side of the app screen to open direct messaging. Direct messaging is another way to share great photos privately without showing everyone who is following you the photo you post.

Instagram that was purchased by Facebook for 1 billion dollars has over 150 million users. Users range from teenagers to young adults and even have celebrities. Instagram gives you the opportunity to take a picture and modify it with the 16 Instagram filters. Direct messaging allows your pictures to be kept more private and intimate with your close friends and not the 500+ followers that you never normally would talk to.

4.6 Million Snap Chat users hacked this New Year.

Millions of accounts are hacked on the app “Snap Chat” this New Years. It appears to have around 4.6 million account numbers and names available for download on the hackers website, making names and partial phone numbers available for download. In a statement to a technology blog called Tech Crunch the hackers said, “Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.” Last week Gibson Security had published a code that could supposedly enable such a hack.

 

For those of you who don’t know Snap Chat is an app that is used primarily by teenagers to send photos with their friends and share messages. Photos can be timed to a number of seconds and then disappear. Snap Chat has become popular with teenagers since their photos can’t be duplicated and if someone takes a screenshot of their photo they are immediately notified.

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Snap Chat released a statement on their blog last week, “Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.”
 In the past the ever so popular app has been offered 3 billion dollars reportedly by Facebook and turned it down. The company currently is not making any money and with this recent breach in information it’s clear something will have to be done. To check to see if you have been affected go to Gibson Security Link  and enter your username.