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LightBox is a beautifully designed new Android application, debuting at this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The app, which describes itself as a "social camera roll," is notable not only for its attractive design, still somewhat of a rarity in the Android world, but also for its business model: LightBox is building for "Android First." What that means is that LightBox's founders, Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel, are building Android applications that will eventually be ported to iOS, and not the other way around.

The LightBox photo app, a combination camera and photo gallery, is only the first of many the company plans to build. These apps, for the most part, will be designed to replace default Android features with professionally designed counterparts.

Let's get this out of the way first: yes, we found this on Quora, the Q&A service poised for media overhype as the second coming of Twitter or blogging or journalism or whatever. But it was an interesting nugget of information from someone in the know and seemed worthy of sharing.

According to Justin Mitchell, an engineer on Facebook Photos, photo privacy on the social network is complex. "Really complex," he says. "Probably 10 people in the world intimately understand the privacy calculations involved when you attempt to view a photo on Facebook. That said, this information should be generally available, and the principles behind it explained." He then did just that, in 8 "easy" steps.

As one of the lucky recipients of the Cr-48 Chrome OS test notebook, I've been experimenting with how well I can unwire to live "in the cloud," as they say. If you're unfamiliar, the Cr-48 notebook computers are being used in Google's Pilot program for its new browser-based computer operating system named for its Web browser, Google Chrome.

Built on top of Linux, the feel of Chrome OS is that of just using a Web browser running on a small notebook computer. This leads to some obvious limitations, of course. For example, how do you transfer files from a USB device to Google Chrome OS? The short answer: you don't. But I found an exception just the other day - I managed to access photos on a USB Flash drive in a surprising way.

The human brain's predictable fallibility leaves us susceptible to the creation of false memories by brand marketers through retroactive product placement into our photos posted on Facebook and other social networks, Creative Lead for Firefox Aza Raskin said in a keynote speech at the University of Michigan School of Information posted online today.

"Changing pictures on Facebook to include product placement will create false memories," Raskin warned at the conclusion of a 45 minute presentation about the plasticity of human memory. "We will have memories of things we never did with brands we never did. Our past actions are the best predictor of our future decisions, so now all of a sudden, our future decisions are in the hands of people who want to make money off of us. That makes me very, very scared. I can see this happening and I can see it happening very soon."

Eye-fi, the creator of camera memory cards that automatically upload photos and videos to your computer or favorite website, has announced that it will launch a software development kit and community this Fall.

That means that any approved application will be able to pull media automatically from your camera into your account online when you walk past an accessible wifi signal. Will the company be generous in approving use of its developer platform? Startups around the world hope so.

NASA today joined the Commons on Flickr. Thanks to this, NASA will now begin to share a large variety of pictures from its vast collection of images on Flickr.  Currently, three image collections ("Launch and Takeoff," "Building NASA" and "Center Namesakes") are available on Flickr. All of these images are published without any copyright restrictions.

In collaboration with the Internet Archive, NASA already makes thousands of images and thousands of hours of video available on NASAimages.org. There, however, users can't comment on pictures.

Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service that allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.

Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."

Trailblazing social news site Digg relaunched with a much-anticipated new version today and it was a busy day behind the scenes. This photo of the Relaunch War Room at Digg headquarters was shared on Twitter by Digg's Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards this afternoon. Another, from Kevin Rose's iPhone, is posted below. The day was not without technical challenges.

Are these photos of the rebirth of a more effective Digg, finally achieving the personalization company leaders have long said they sought, or scenes from the decline of yesterday's online empire - surpassed by new social networks that will in time fade away as well? Only time will tell.

Last month, social photo-sharing site Flickr finally added some long-awaited Facebook integration to its service, allowing users to simultaneously post photos on both Flickr and Facebook with one upload. But there was a small problem with the way that the new feature was set up: it basically spammed your Facebook Wall with post after post about your new photos.

Today, that problem has been fixed, reports Flickr.