Twitter started its own Google Play beta testing campaign and now the handful of people that registered for the early beta releases on Google+ (now closed) can get to experience the latest version of its Android app.

The latest release – Twitter 5.0 beta for Android brings a significant (and welcome) UI overhaul that changes the fixed clickable tabs for swipeable ones that you can rearrange through the side-accessible menu. Read more »

You may remember Google acquired the team that built the Snapseed application for iOS a few months ago. Although we did see a version of Snapseed for Android we didn’t hear much from them ever since. That is until now.

Google has now integrated some of the photo editing features of the Snapseed app into Google+. You can now open your photos on Google+ and go into the new Edit option available on top. This brings up some familiar options you may have seen in the Snapseed app on the side. Read more »

Twitter is a buzzing social network of which conversations have always been an integral part but up until now were rather hard to follow – you’d need to dig through people’s profiles in order to see what’s going on.

However now Twitter is rolling out an update on its website as well as on Android and iOS clients, which puts conversations into focus. You’ll get up to three replies to a tweet displayed and there’s a new tap to see all replies thread link. Read more »

Facebook takes security seriously – as it should seeing how over a billion people trust it with the private details of their lives. Yet a high profile incident came to question the company’s capability. An IT researcher found a vulnerability that allows you to post a comment on anyone’s wall, even if you’re not friends (which Facebook rules prohibit).

The researcher initially reported the problem, but after feeling that Facebook didn’t take the issue seriously, he posted on none other than Mark Zuckerberg’s wall (in case you don’t know, Zuckerberg is founder and CEO of Facebook). Read more »

Instagram has started rolling out the 4.1 update for its popular social networking app for iOS and Android. One of the key new features in this update is the ability to import videos from your library. 4.0 brought the ability to post videos but the videos had to be shot on the spot before uploading. This new feature lets you import and edit any previously shot video from your phone’s gallery.

Another addition is automatic straightening of shots. What this feature does is analyzes your images and automatically straightens them if it detects a tilt in the horizon. It also lets you manually adjust the image till you think it is perfectly level. This is an excellent tool to level your images after shooting if you think they are slightly tilted. As of now, this feature is only available on iOS. Read more »

Twitter has updated their iOS and Android apps with a new form of two-step authentication. For those not aware, two-step authentication is where other than just using your password you have to approve a login request from another device before someone can log in to your account.

Twitter introduced two-step authentication a few months back for the web service but it is now available on the mobile apps as well. In this method, you no longer have to provide your mobile number for authorizing access to your account but the service instead sends push messages and in-app approval to authenticate a log in. Read more »

Facebook has released a new update for their Android app, which brings one of the key features of the ill-fated Facebook Home app. Now, through an option in the settings menu, you can enable the Cover Feed feature on your Android device, without having to install Facebook Home app.

If you are not aware, Cover Feed takes over the lockscreen on your Android device with a custom lockscreen that plays a slideshow of your friends’ Facebook photos in the background underneath the unlock button. While it sounds great in theory, actually having all your friends’ photos appear on your lockscreen isn’t such a great idea as most of the time the photos aren’t as good as you’d like them to be (not with my friends, at least). Read more »

It has been a tough start for Carbon. The app started life as a promising Twitter client for Android that a lot of people were waiting for but due to issues with the developers unable to publish it to the Play Store as a paid app from their region, it had to be released for free.

The development then seemingly stopped and for a long time now Carbon has been an abandonware. Although a great little app, The presence of deal-breaking bugs and lack of updates meant you couldn’t really use it even if you wanted to. Thankfully, all that changes with today’s update. Read more »

Tumblr, the popular micro blogging platform, which allows you to add multimedia to your posts, has updated its Android and iOS applications.

The updated versions of Tumblr for Android and iOS come with a brand new search and explore tools. The latest tweak lets you check what’s trending on Tumblr and get suggested blogs for anything you search. Read more »

Anyone who uses Twitter regularly knows how annoying it is to receive a direct message (or DM, as they are commonly known) on one of your Twitter apps and read it, only to find it still being marked as unread on all the other apps. Thankfully, the latest update fixes this issue, at least on the official first party Twitter apps.

In a co-ordinated update to its iPhone, iPad, Android, OS X apps, as well as TweetDeck, Twitter Web and Twitter Mobile, Twitter now syncs your read DMs, which means reading them on one device automatically marks them as read on other official apps. Read more »

Vine has updated the iOS version of its app with several new features. First of all, there are some new camera tools such as grid mode, focus and ghost. Focus allows you to tap on the screen to focus at a particular point (usually tapping on the screen starts the recording). Ghost places a translucent overlay of your last shot on the viewfinder to make composition easier.

The other new feature is channels. There are now 15 channels that you can upload your videos to, such as comedy, music, art, cats, dogs, etc. and you can also choose to view Vines from a particular channel. Read more »

After releasing on the Google Play Store recently, the Vine app is now available on Kindle Fire. The app requires Android 4.0 and above, so can work on every version of the Kindle Fire, except for the very first model.

For those who are not aware, Vine is a new social networking service for sharing short, six second videos. It used to be known as the Instagram of videos, until recently when Instagram itself added support for videos. The Vine app for Kindle Fire is the first tablet version of the app, as it is only available on smartphones on iOS and Android. Having said that, the UI is similar to the Play Store version of the app and not really optimized for the big screen as such. Read more »

When the Vine app eventually managed to waddle over to Android, it was a mere shadow of the iOS version, thanks to a buggy initial release and missing several features. Subsequent updates have made it bit more usable and now some more features have been brought over from the iOS version.

In the latest update, you now get the option to share your Vines on Facebook as well, whereas you could only do it over Twitter previously. It also adds the ability to search for users and hashtags, which was strangely missing in the previous version. Read more »

In a bid to take down Twitter and Vine, Facebook and Instagram have added a new feature on the popular mobile social network: videos. Now along with being able to upload photos, Instagram will also let you upload short videos from your phone.

After updating to the latest v4.0 of the application on iOS and Android, you will notice that there is a new button in the viewfinder mode. Tapping it brings the video recording interface. This works similar to Vine, where you press and hold the record button to record the video. You can release it as many times you want during the fifteen second span you are allotted and the app stitches the moments into one clip. As with Vine, audio is recorded as well. Read more »

Facebook users may have noticed the addition of a new button next to the option to enter your comment to a post. Now you will be able to post images within your Facebook comments. While earlier images could only be inserted if you had a direct link to them, you can now choose to directly upload an image on your hard drive as a comment.

As of now this feature is only available on the web version of Facebook and should be rolling out to everyone across the world. The mobile apps can display images in comments but you can’t upload images as of now. Also, the website only supports still images and you can’t insert GIFs, which is unfortunate (or fortunate, depending upon your tolerance level for GIFs). Read more »