The Internet and Social Media are becoming more and more visual, and social networks like Facebook have recognized that fact and are constantly working to make it even easier to share images. Facebook recently implemented an improvement to the Status Update feature for the full web version that allows you to drag and drop images to the status update field, as well as upload and attach multiple images to your update.

In the screenshot to the right, you can see an update I posted earlier this morning where I was able to easily drag an image into the status update box after I'd begun typing in my update. Once the image uploaded, I was given the opportunity to drag more images into the space if I wanted to.

It's been a rough Holiday Season for Instagram. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing startup continued their PhotoWar with Twitter and stopped supporting Twitter Cards, resulting in all images ever shared to Twitter from Instagram changing from an embedded image to just a link.

Sometimes, it's good when two of your major competitors are fighting and getting lots of negative publicity. That can create an opportunity for your business in the market, and that's what's happening now between Twitter and Instagram/Facebook and these PhotoWars. Meanwhile, Yahoo's photo sharing service, Flickr, is taking advantage of the chaos and quietly working to improve their service and attract more users from Instagram.

Yesterday we reported that Instagram had completely disabled support for embedded Twitter images, which resulted in previous tweets containing Instagram images to no longer have an image - just a link to the image on Instagram. It has been known for months that Twitter has been working with Aviary to implement their own Instagram-like filter system. While their initial timeframe is not known, it is assumed that when Twitter released the ability to apply filters through the web-interface yesterday, it was done so in direct response to Instagram's actions over the weekend.

Instagram has had a busy few days! Over the weekend, the social picture sharing app decided that they no longer wanted to play nice with Twitter. Then, today, a new version of their app was released that contained quite a few great changes and features.

Instagram App Update

The update to the Instagram app included a new filter called Willow. The update also brought a major upgrade to the built-in camera functionality that included an improvement in picture-taking speed, as well as a new interface that looks great.

The update also improved the tilt-shift functionality (photo blur) and made it possible to scroll indefinitely when viewing other user's photos.