Sierra, the latest filter to join the Instagram family, is a white-bordered filter that adds a lightened, low-contrast vintage look to photos. As far as Instagram filters go, it's pretty standard stuff, but it's always nice to have new options. The more substantial addition to the app is a feature called Lux, which lets users automatically increase the brightness of photos and boost the contrast. The option is meant to offer a way to improve underexposed photos and make them more Instagrammable.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed last year that building an Android version of Instagram is "a major priority" for the company, and the company is known to be working on such an app. It's really not a matter of if, but when. Last week, rumors began swirling that Instagram for Android could be imminent. We reached out to Systrom, who declined to give any specifics about a timeline.

For Instagram, Android is the most logical next step for growth. Having stirred early buzz in the tech press and later named Apple's iPhone app of the year for 2011, the service has done quite well, especially considering it only exists on iOS. It now boasts over 15 million users on Apple's mobile operating system alone.

Launching an Android app will expose it to a massive number of potential new users. Android commands more than 46% of the smartphone market, according to Nielsen. If its success on iOS is any indication, the service can expect to see its user base flourish once the Android version drops.

The other top priority at the company's headquarters is building out a Web version of the service. This one is a little less urgent, because they are so many third party Web UIs for Instagram, and probably not as much demand for an official one as there seems to be for an Android app.

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Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb uses Shutterstock for some of its post illustrations.

Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don't communicate that sentiment.

"You need a light source from the side," says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photographer. "You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can't do with a single light source."

"You're in a dark restaurant, you have to use a single frontal flash, it looks like shit," Hamilton says. "Not even a portrait looks good when you're taking a photo of friends."

To prove that it is possible to take better food photos from a smartphone, Hamilton goes out to restaurants every week and shoots food photos with his iPhone. Then goes back to his studio and touches them up. He documents the entire project on his blog, The Restaurant Project. Here's a short video he produced with tips for taking better food photos. Some of the ideas: Avoid incandescent light. Blow out the background. Use simple light and propping.

"The majority of people who are posting photos to Facebook and Twitter are doing it for the pure pleasure of it. They're not getting business out of it," says Hamilton. "Whether it's going to a restaurant like NEXT or going to McDonald's, they're still Facebook-ing about it."

Instagram Filters Won't Help You Make The Photo Less Food Porn-y

Jon and Curt decided to take this food porn idea too far, creating a horrible Tumblr blog full of all the bad photo photographs you've ever dreamed of. A photo I shot has been added to this Internet hall of shame. Here it is.

It's gorgeous, right? That's what I thought. So, I tweeted it to Jon and Curt, looking for some sort of approval. "I would argue that this is not food porn," I said, proudly. I could single-handedly beat food porn.

Curt replied with a typical, quotable Curt line: "GOOD GOD!" "It is to food porn as amateur porn is to porn - even worse."

Shocked, I tried a few other similarly desperate tweets. Then at last, I admitted defeat: "@curthopkins @jonmwords Nooooo! I've cornered myself into an art food porn-ified corner of hellish green triangles."

Then Jon added my photo to the Tumblr food porn hall of shame.

Why did this photo become food porn? The rest of this conversation occurred on Facebook with ReadWriteWeb's Editor-in-Chief, Richard MacManus after I commented on his horrific photo of bean slop.

I think we can all agree that those beans look disgusting. But Richard admitted to purposely making the food look more horrific, for Jon's benefit.

After I asked him, he honestly explained to me why my green cake looked gross.

"It was very artistic, I'll give it that :) I think the green is what creates the opposite effect..." he FB commented to me. "Well, artistically the photo definitely works - the triangle shaped table, the brown / green colors, etc. In terms of whether the photo makes the cake look more edible, honestly the Instagram filter makes the green look a little sickly (color wise) and it also somehow heightens the sugariness of the cake. It's shiny and kind of glistens," he said.

I appreciated his honesty. Interestingly, in this case, it was my seemingly awesome use of an Instagram filter, which I thought might save this from amateur food pornification. Instead, it was the very thing that actually sent my photo straight to amateur food pornland.

Today 1000memories launched the ShoeBox Facebook app, which gives you an opportunity to scan paper photos from the past and post them to Facebook. It brings back those "pre-Internet photos from the past."

"A Facebook Timeline-integrated app (such as ShoeBox) which lets you post photos into the past, represents a recreation of an autobiographical memory," says Dr. Ash Nadkarni of the Boston Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry. (She co-authored the study "Why Do People Use Facebook?") "There are several facets of this activity that could influence our perception of our memories -- specifically by triggering memory bias, a cognitive bias that enhances or impairs the recall of a memory."

If this photo belonged to you, and you wanted to put it into the year 1981 on your Facebook Timeline, you could use ShoeBox to do that.

"It's easy to forget that Facebook is only seven years old, which means most of our photos and memories are not online yet," says 1000memories co-founder, Rudy Adler. "We built ShoeBox to finally get these photos from our past out of the closet and online where they can be enjoyed by everyone."

These photos might be enjoyed, but how will sharing them affect the memory you have of what actually happened?

"Sharing photos into your past plays on a type of memory bias called rosy retrospection, the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was," says Dr. Nadkarni. "So, as a result, a person may wind up remembering their first date as having been much better than it really was."  

Posting old photos could also trigger an egocentric bias, explains Nadkarni, which recalls the past in a self-serving manner. "When a person posts and views a picture of their college graduation--they may remember their exam grades as being better than they were."

Another bias that posting old photos could trigger is the misinformation effect. "Misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory," Dr. Nadkarni explains. "So, if a friend posts a comment to your wall about a photo of the two of you together at your high school prom as 'great party,' you're more likely to remember it as such, even if you'd actually had a so-so time."

Facebook Timeline wants us to upload those photos, regardless of any cognitive bias they could trigger.

After installing the Facebook ShoeBox app, you can connect with Facebook friends or e-mail address book contacts. You can also download the ShoeBox iPhone app to start scanning, or just upload photos directly from your computer to Facebook.

The makers of ShoeBox want to help you dig up--err, remember--your past. Because without it, how can you truly be yourself on Facebook?

Flickr image via Alan Denney.

Dolphin and Evernote are teaming up to release two extensions to Dolphin's Android browser. The first and most exciting is powerful and popular Web-based image editor Skitch. The other is Evernote itself. These new functions are the first time that Evernote has reached out to a third-party Android browser.

Skitch as a stand-alone photo editor is only nominally interesting. Add it to the Web with browser-based functionality and it becomes a very powerful tool.

The other half of the announcement is not quite as exciting. Evernote for Dolphin Android is another step in Evernote's quest to be everywhere. Literally everywhere. Evernote is amazing at designing and shipping new products almost every week, whether it is a new mobile extension, a desktop extension, a new app like Hello or the integration of Skitch and other acquisitions into other products. Evernote for Dolphin will work in exactly the same way that any of its other browser extensions do: find content on the Web that you want to clip and save it to Evernote. This time, the content is from a mobile device.

There is a lot of competition between Android browsers. The top three are probably the stock Android browser shipped with every device, Dolphin and Opera. While the stock Android browser has not historically been a top tier performer, it looks like it got quite a bit better with the release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Dolphin calls itself the first "gesture-based" mobile browser while Opera delivers speed and the ability to trim down on data usage.

Dolphin has recently started adding extensions to its Android browser and that may put it ahead of Opera for the time being. Dolphin for Android now has Skitch, Evernote, Box, ReadItLater, eBay Search and more (a couple dozen, not all relevant). Opera mobile does not yet do browser extensions.

Aviary will now compete with the likes of Instagram, which recently began allowing users to publish their images directly to Facebook. Previously, the hipster-fun Instagrams lived only in Instagramland, never seeing the light of Facebook day.

The bigger question here: Will users trade in the über-popular mobile social Instagram for a Facebook photo editing app? Probably not. But at least now there's another way to add that retro tint to your photos without ever leaving Facebook.

The golden age of mobile photography is upon us. Smartphones are now more capable at producing high-quality photos than digital cameras were just five years ago. Editing photos has been an evolving process but a lot of great services have been released to mobile users in the last year such as filters from Instagram or full-featured suites from Aviary and Skitch. Today, Aviary is making a dramatic update to its platform to gives users a set of powerful tools to edit photos on the go.

Version 2 of Aviary mobile releases a bunch of new feature and performance updates. Here is a breakdown of what is new:

One-touch auto-enhance: The ability to easily touch up a photo without going through a complicated editing process. Use one of Aviary's pre-set optimization settings and enhance a photo with a tap.

Improved effects: 10 more effects with new border designs.

Unique dials: This is really a user interface function. A dial instead of a slider for brightness and color palettes.

Stickers: Bowties, cigars, funny glasses.

New design: What would an update be to a mobile app if it did not completely throw out its old design and start anew. Sometimes this works for the better, many times it does not.

Minimal branding: This is perhaps the best rollout for this version of Aviary and hopefully it is not limited to just the mobile versions of the apps. Anyone that has used an Aviary extension before knows that the little blue lower-case A company logo pops up on just about everything you want to edit or take a screen shot of. This is now hidden and can be accessed by swiping to the last page of the app for details.

Aviary is up to date with all the mobile platforms. It can instituted by developers writing apps for Android 2.2 (API level 8) or higher or iOS 4+. It will also work on all browsers and tablets that support HTML5, JavaScript or Flash.

Aviary also wants to help developers make money through the mobile SDK. Users of apps that have Aviary embedded can purchase premium effects as well as original and branded stickers. Aviary will split the revenue with the app maker.

Note, at the time of publication, the Aviary app was still awaiting Apple App Store approval. It can be found through partner apps such as Pic Stitch.

Does Aviary outshine Skitch or other photo editors on iOS and Android? The SDK is a clever bit of implementation for developers to add photo editing capabilities to apps. Let us know what you think of the newest version in the comments.

For as long as Instagram has been around, it has published photos at unique, Instagram-hosted URLs, which were then linked to on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The link to the image could be retweeted or "liked" on Facebook, but the image itself remained off on a cold, lonely island on Instagram's servers. The only people that could interact with the photo itself were your Instagram followers who, of course, could only do so using the photo-sharing service's iOS app. Well, that just changed.

It makes Instagram's Web presence a tad more engaging and useful in lieu of an actual official website, something Techcrunch's Alexia Tsotsis pointed out. To date, Instagram has yet to roll out a Web interface or Android app for the beloved photo-sharing service, which is enjoyed exclusively by iOS users.

The integration may also serve to boost awareness of Instagram itself, which has about 15 million users. It's not completely analogous, but when Spotify and other music streaming services integrated with Facebook last year, they saw a dramatic increase in sign-ups. Of course, that was for a relatively new service that anybody with a desktop computer can access. Still, there's always room for more growth on iOS and the company could be dropping that Android app any day now.

But Ink361, formerly known as Inkstagram, has built a few original features on top of Instagram. Today, it launched a map viewer, allowing users to browse a world map displaying geotagged Instagram photos.

In September, the site added hashtag albums, enabling topical grouping of photos in a way that isn't possible on Instagram alone. While Instagram uses hashtags to sort photos, Ink361 allows users to create their own albums and share them as links.

What's Up With That Name?

I asked van Apeldoorn what the new name was about. "We help you to share your world in 360 degrees and add something extra to that," he said. I noted that the old name - Inkstagram - was quite similar to Instagram itself, and I asked whether that had anything to do with the change. "The rebranding was not our idea, but based upon an offer we couldn't refuse ;-)," was his response.

I asked van Apeldoorn directly whether Instagram asked Inkstagram to change its name. "We had a friendly conversation over this topic that resulted to the rebranding," he said.

It's all settled now, and Ink361 has a few features that make it stand out from the rest. Ink361 gets around 220,000 unique visitors per month and has 27,000 followers on Instagram.

Which Instagram Web viewers do you use? Let us know in the comments.

Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram and being available on every major mobile platform and having a highly functional Web-based UI.

As SocialFresh writer Jason Keath points out, Instagram also benefits from the fact that its core functionality - taking, sharing and viewing photographs - are things we've done since the advent of consumer photography. Sharing our precise physical location with a network of others is an activity that's not quite as firmly embedded in our lives already.

Instagram For Android: Still in the Pipeline

Instagram's most recent project was a significant overhaul to the app's underlying functionality that went live in September. The company has long promised that the two items next on their list are a Web interface and and Android app.

It's that application for Android, which CEO Kevin Systrom recently confirmed they're currently building, that stands to send the service's user adoption rate through the roof. As beloved as the iPhone is, iOS still makes up a smaller share of the market than Android, which has itself ballooned pretty quickly. If the current buzz around the iOS version carries over across platforms, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect Instagram's user base to double within a year or so.

The company's other top priority, a Web-based UI for the service, should also help attract users. Right now, people see Instagram shots posted to Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter all the time. When they click through, however, all they see is the photo itself, some basic information about the user who posted it and a link inviting them to download the iPhone app. For those who are unfamiliar with the service, there's very little detail about what Instagram is and why they should care about it. One way to get that idea across would be to offer the ability to explore more images from within the desktop browser.

You can geo-tag your food events, describe the scenario, take pictures, add caloric information with the food tracker and share through Facebook and Twitter. Basically, if you like to scrapbook your life and especially your adventures through the culinary world, that is what Evernote Food is designed for.

Evernote Hello is a way to remember people's names. It is a lot like an app that came out last month called Namerick, so similar to the point where we wonder if Evernote borrowed the idea or just hired the developer. Hello bases remembering people's names on three key principles: faces, time and context. So, what the person looks like, where and when you met them and what you were doing at the time.

When you meet someone new, you have have them using the forward-facing camera on the iPhone to take a picture of themselves (or take it yourself). The app will take four photos for a mosaic of that persons face. It will then create an "encounter" which contains the person's face and where you met them and any other notes you add at the time.

There are other services available that have the functionality of both Food and Hello. Facebook, especially with the the Timeline rollout set to come, is probably the first to pop to mind. Like Evernote, Facebook wants to be the place where you record your life and share it with your friends. Evernote's two new apps are perfect for people that like to document to their personal cloud through Evernote and do not like the idea of being attached to Facebook's social graph. If you are a heavy Evernote user, you will probably end up using Hello and Food. If not, there is probably no reason to do so.

Are you going to use Evernote Food and Hello? Do you like the idea of digitally scrap booking your life? Let us know in the comments.

Color has now launched in private beta around the concept of visual Facebook status updates, called "visits." We explore the new color and its evolution below.

Here is what Color has become: a means of posting 30-second soundless status update videos to Facebook. Color does not like to refer to these status updates as video but for lack of a better word on how to describe moving pictures in the digital age, that is what it is. The way Color wants to think of it is instead of using words to update for Facebook status, you will use these visits to show what is around you. A live broadcast to Facebook with the option of adding a caption. It is not a two-way communications portal or a way to do long form live video from a mobile device, like Qik. It is fairly simple, just a 30-second visual feed of your surroundings.

Color still attaches itself to location. On Android devices the app will prompt users to turn on GPS so the app can work more efficiently. On iOS it will prompt to make sure that location services are turned on. Once launched and attached to Facebook, Color will prompt users to post a photo or a visit. That will then pop up in the Facebook newsfeed as "Live From (Location)." It seems that a lot of the back-end systems for Color are alive and well, what CEO Bill Nguyen described as Color being a "research and data company" when ReadWriteWeb had an in-depth interview with him shortly after the funding announcement. If Color is not careful it is going to step in some of Facebook's privacy controversies, especially around a sensitive issue like location.

Color will also be integrated into Facebook's Timeline feature, whenever that happens to launch (now more than two months overdue). Within the app itself, there is a feed of all your friends' pictures that have been recently posted to their walls. Not just friends' visits, all recent photo activity. There is also a personal timeline of all your activity, from visits you made to pictures you have posted to pictures that you have been tagged in.

Color uses an aggressive push notifications system as well, one that we turned off on both Android and iOS (on an iPad 2) about two minutes after installing the app. The notification sounds like a doorbell and comes whenever a person hosts a live visit.

Cold Start, Lean Startup & Network Effects

One of the problems that Color had when it first launched was the "cold start" problem. It did not have the network effect (attract more users which in turn further develop the platform which attracts more users) from the beginning and was more or less just another app to most users. One that they did not understand. The fact that it had a terrible and confusing user interface did not help Color's cause.

Color has lost two of its three super star founders leaders since it launched. In July, ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about how it was more or less a failure of the Lean Startup philosophy and CEO Bill Nguyen has been referred to as a "the boy in the bubble" that is really good at making money for venture capitalists.

We liked the concept of Color when it was announced and our founder Richard MacManus said that it had the potential to be as big as Twitter. "That wasn't my finest hour in analysis," MacManus said.

Color will eventually tie itself to Facebook's open social graph, which the company said was going to happen later this month. So, the elastic, implicit social graph has been completely abandoned.

Update 10:10 p.m. EST Dec. 1, 2012:

There was a bit of miscommunication with Color as to the nature of the elastic graph. We asked during our preview if the Color was going to still have the "implicit" graph. At the time, Color said no. What they meant was that this preview version would not have the implicit (or "elastic") graph but that when Color comes back out of private beta, the implicit data connections would return. We will be dutiful in explaining how that process works when Color launches to the public once again. Color also noted that while it will be coming out of private beta soon, it cannot speak for Facebook as to when the open graph will be made available to the public. We also noted above that two of the three super star "leaders" (not founders) had left the company.

Facebook creates implicit data but it uses it more for its own purposes. Color will do that as well, though in a naturally different way now that it is tied to the explicit social graph of Facebook, augmenting original idea of implicit data (having similar data points to a person in a similar location taking similar pictures). Attaching Color to Facebook will certainly help with the cold start problem but some people may not see the visit as anything fundamentally different from the fairly simple act of uploading a video taken with a smartphone camera to Facebook.

Does Color have a chance? With funding in the bank, it can certainly pivot again if it needs to (if it has talent left at that point). Let us know what you think about the fundamental nature of the visit in the comments. The video that is not a video but rather a real-time broadcast of your surroundings posted to Facebook.

For those who aren't thrilled with Photo Stream, Adobe launched an alternative today called Carousel. The new applications for Mac and iOS allow users to centralize their photo library in the cloud, making them accessible across devices. The software also syncs edits that are made regardless of which device they were made on, and also keeps a back-up copy of the original.

Photo Stream's Limitations

When iCloud launched, I eagerly turned it on for just about everything but photos. My iPad (first generation, so it doesn't have a camera) mostly contains screen shots of apps I've taken for work. My iPhone almost entirely contains Instagram shots. On the desktop, I don't use iPhoto, but rather edit photos from my SLR using Photoshop and back them up on an external hard drive. I personally have no reason to merge all of these images together.

Some users who did activate Photo Stream have complained about some of its limitations. It only keeps photos online for 30 days and so far Apple hasn't provided users a way to delete individual photos from iCloud or single out images to be excluded from it. It's all or nothing with Photo Stream.

For now, Carousel is only available on Mac OS X (Lion only) and iOS, but apps for Android and Windows are reportedly on the way.

It was the 2.0 upgrade that offered Instagram users the most dramatic reworking of the app's camera feature yet. In addition to changes to the camera UI and some performance tweaks, the filters in particular were totally rewritten to enable users to preview them before snapping the photo. The team also rolled out four new filters.

In this latest update, Instagram returns to the original Brannan and Earlybird filters, which appear to have been two of the most noticeably-altered of the bunch. None of the other filters appear to have been changed back to their original appearance however.

Another complaint some users had after the 2.0 upgrade was that the blur created by the tilt-shift feature was no longer as subtle as it was initially. That issue was also addressed in today's update.

It remains unclear if other filters will be adjusted, but that probably depends on how vocal users get. Presumably, the five-person Instagram team is now focusing the bulk of their energy on their next two big projects: building a Web-based interface for the service and a much-anticipated Android app.

There's also a new feature for all Flickr users called Photo Session, which lets members browse photo slideshows in sync together over the Web. Users can chat and doodle on photos during a Photo Session. It supports all major desktop browsers, iPhone and iPad.

Shoot and Share

Flickr has had a native iOS app for years, but the filters are new to the Android app. Photo apps that add various shades of brown are a hot commodity. Facebook, a huge hub for photo sharing, is building one, and Apple is building filters straight into iOS 5.

Of course, the photo filter app to watch is Instagram, which released version 2.0 last week, but it's iOS only. Though Instagram received a huge overhaul in the latest update, there's still no word on the conspicuously absent Android version. Flickr's app targeting Android capitalizes on that missing spot in the Android world where Instagram should be.

You can download the Flickr Android app from the Android Market.

Photo Session

Photo Session is a neat feature sort of like Google Plus Hangouts, only they're for sharing photos in person. Users can view the same slideshow over the Web and chat and draw on photos using built-in tools. It's a nice way to create some virtual togetherness, but it doesn't seem to fill an existing demand for a service like this.

Are you a Flickr user? What do you think of the new features?