Tech developer ADR Studios has revealed a new concept design, that is sure to make the many Instagram users in the world gather their pitchforks and torches (or just start a cause on Kickstarter) and plead for someone to make this a mass produced reality.

Meet the Instagram camera.

That is a digital handheld camera that can print an instant photo from the model, complete with all of the features the Instagram app allows. What strikes me right away about this project is:

A. That’s a beautiful camera. Not just “hipster cool” but genuinely well designed.

B. This is an incredible marriage of times gone by charm (the polaroid this whole thing is based off of) and new technology (Instagram, obviously), that wouldn’t look out of place in a 50′s sci-fi where a vague idea of what future technology might hold, was paired with a current product to create something that’s just kind of out there.

C. Far from a novelty, this thing could actually make a practical investment considering its’ list of features.

• 16 GB mass storage.
• Wifi and Bluetooth.
• 4:3 touchscreen.
• 2 main lens, first for main capture, second for 3D filters, webcam applications and QR Code capturing.
• Optical zoom.
• LED Flash.
• Internal printer to make your Instagram photos real.
• Paper cartridge with Instagram Paper Sheets.
• Dedicated 4 colors ink tanks.
• InstaOs 1.0, which put together Facebook and Instagram App feature.

Now again, this is still a concept and as of now, no one has plans to make this thing on a retail level. Still though, with the mass popularity of the Instagram app, and the many social networking friendly features this thing has, someone with the ability to make this would be a fool not to considering it’s almost literally a license to print money.

Facebook is moving to verified accounts for celebrities, and they will be able to create other accounts with fake names.

It’s been a long time coming, but Google has finally made a serious entry into the social media market. It took three attempts – you remember Wave and Buzz right? No? That’s okay, no one does – but it looks like Google may finally have a winner on its hands.

Still, Google+ has a long way to go. The service has launched to a relatively small group of users and continue to be limited by invites, but that could provide the kind of hype Google wants for a new service. Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote about the service for Bullz-Eye:

One of the coolest parts of Google+ is Hangout, which allows users to jump into text and video chat rooms with customizable accessibility. It’s a product that could easily punch a hole in Skype and become an amazing productivity tool. That’s especially true for the companies that have made the transition to Google’s online products.

Sparks, on the other hand, is the service’s big flop. It’s meant to be some sort of social news feed, but it’s cumbersome instead of sleek, slow instead of fast, and skimpy where it should be overflowing with information. Sparks actually surprises me in its shortcomings. Google has mountains of information about me. I’m always signed in to its email service, I use the search engine exclusively, I have an Android phone, I use Google Reader on a daily basis, and I’m writing this article in Google Docs. Why is it so hard for me to get a decent feed on Sparks?

For the rest of the article, head over to the Bullz-Eye Gadgets channel.

There’s more talk than usual about Facebook these days, thanks to the big investment from Goldman-Sachs that could lead to an IPO this year. As investment opportunity looms large for the social giant, a lot of people are carefully examining the company to see whether or not it’s worth dropping some cash on shares.

There’s a lot to read, and while some of it is virtually useless (sorry, I don’t care whether 50 Cent thinks Facebook is worth $50 billion or not), there are a couple of standout articles. The most interesting I found was an article on CNN, in which Douglas Rushkoff compares the potential Facebook IPO to the AOL/Time Warner merger. It sounds a little off base, until you see just what Rushkoff is talking about.

Here’s a peek:

Indeed, 11 years ago this week, when AOL announced its $350 billion merger with Time Warner, I was asked to write an OpEd for the New York Times explaining what the deal between old and new media companies really meant. I said that AOL was cashing in its over-valued dotcom stock in order to purchase a stake in a “real” media company with movie studios, theme parks and even cable. In short, the deal meant AOL knew their reign was over.

The Times didn’t run the piece. Of course, the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL’s revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly.

Rushkoff goes on to cite other examples of overvaluation in the tech sector and makes a compelling case against a Facebook boom.

Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference to announce a new messaging service. I say service because it’s not the email program that everyone was expecting. That’s part of the package, but it’s a small part and an optional one.

This new system is actually about conglomerating all of your message services – email, SMS, chat – in one place. The big issue, as Facebook sees it, is that we have too many places to look for our text-based communication with one another. By building the system into Facebook, Zuckerberg hopes Facebook can become your complete social hub for the web.

It’s more than that, though. While working on this project, Zuckerberg talked to high school students about the way they’re using email. Turns out, they aren’t. It’s too formal, which I can totally understand. I can get upwards of a hundred emails a day, and that’s a far cry from the deluge that other tech professionals will see. I don’t need to see, “Hi Jeff,” or “Hello Jeff,” or “Jeff, how are you today?” from promoters and marketers or even my coworkers. I need information, and I prefer that it’s short and to the point.

Zuckerberg is obviously pointing at the end of email, or at least the kind of formal, subject-line message system we understand as email today. He can’t say that, though, if only because he’s Mark Zuckerberg.

I’ve been skeptical of a Facebook phone launch since the moment I first heard of the idea. My biggest question was, why? Why would Facebook want to get into the hardware game? Why would they try to pull market away from existing platforms that are already using its applications? Why would they partner with a manufacturer and go through the headaches of fabrication just to have one more device that runs the Facebook app?

I can’t think of a single compelling reason to do any of that. There’s a reason Facebook didn’t introduce a phone at its mobile even this Wednesday, and that reason is the picture you see above. All of those devices run the Facebook app. All of them. That’s what Facebook wants. It wants all of them. All the devices, all the people, everyone, everywhere, using Facebook on a mobile device, all the time. They’ll get it, too.

Yesterday’s Facebook announcement was about leveraging third party developers, about getting all sorts of tools to further enmesh people in the Facebook platform, essentially for free. As the Phandroid article I’m sourcing this from puts things:

Now, instead of Facebook going it alone to create the perfect solutions, they’ve got a world of developers all “working for them” – for free – to make Facebook’s social and mobile platform infinitely successful. Android is no different. Every time another app or game lands on Android Market, Google has provided consumers with value. All they did was create the initial tools, and now thousands and thousands of people are out there building value for their product.

That’s what the mobile announcement was. It’s giving consumers value through quality experience and giving developers the tools to reinforce that quality experience. This is what will keep Facebook from turning into MySpace. Facebook doesn’t need a phone.

There’s some interesting data around this year’s election results and the number of people who became “fans” of the winning candidates on Facebook. According to All Facebook, 74 percent of the House and 81 percent of the Senate victories were accurately predicted by the number of fans the winning candidates received.

Obviously this stat is a bit anecdotal without all the supporting evidence required to back it up (Did the fans actually vote? Did they vote for that candidate? etc.), but it’s interesting to see how Facebook engages the political spectrum. So much of what happens on Facebook is drivel, but everyone has that friend, you know, the one constantly sending you cause invites and voting reminders and all that. Those people, at least in my experience, tend to behave the same way in public – constantly talking politics and causes, so maybe it’s not so different.

At any rate, give a looksee to All Facebook and their awesome election tracker for more intimate details on each race and the Facebook correlation.

A few months ago I went through and cleaned house on my Facebook account. My big problem with the service is exactly what makes it so popular – the prioritization of broad, largely meaningless connections over close, intimate ones. I dumped my broad connections, and it felt great.

That’s where Facebook falls short, and where there’s room for a serious competitor. As Facebook pushes ever closer to a billion users, there’s really no way anyone will unseat it – not immediately, anyway – but someone could easily steal a lot of time from Facebook users by simply creating a more closed and intimate network. It’s a strategy that venture capitalist Dave McClure covers in detail on his blog, Master of 500 Hats.

A quick excerpt:

I’ve got too many goddamn friends on Facebook.

yeah, that’s right: i’ve got over 2,000 “friends” on FB, and it’s fucking KILLING me. Now admittedly most normal folks don’t have *that* many Facebook friends — true: i’m tremendously insecure, an only child, & a pathetic people pleaser — but regardless a lot of “normal” people have the same problem with only a few hundred friends. and i’m guessing neither they nor i want to share our most jealously-guarded deep dark secrets with *everyone* on Facebook. but they might just share it with a smaller subset.

Read the full post here.

Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post has made a name for himself as an outspoken Facebook critic, and he’s finally got some data to back up that hatred. Using youropenbook.org, Weingarten put together some of Facebook’s most banal status updates.

It’s a stark look at what people are willing to share, but let’s not forget just how many people are on Facebook. To say that the updates are different than a typical conversation you could potentially have over the course of a week seems like a stretch to me. Do I want to hear about my neighbor’s pimple? No. But that person likely wasn’t sharing the thought for me. Would a couple of my college buddies share that same information with me unsolicited if we were sitting in the same room? Absolutely.

It seems like Weingarten really takes issue with an observed lack of propriety/formality on Facebook, or really the internet in general. He talks about the ubiquitous “LOL” this way:

Facebook users may be bored, but, paradoxically, they also are easily amused. We know this, because they are always laughing out loud. LOLs occur with such frequency they are literally impossible to count: Dozens arrive every second. A subset of those laughers are simultaneously rolling on the floor — but still in numbers too large to tally. It is only with a third winnowing — those both rolling and laughing their behinds off — that the numbers become manageable: 390 per day.

It’s a funny interpretation, but LOL is the internet chuckle, something I think Weingarten could stand to do a little more often.

Though still not a huge fan of Facebook, I decided that I hadn’t given it a fair enough shake. I was accepting just about anyone who friended me and wasn’t taking the time to manage those people into groups that received the information I wanted them to see (or not see).

A couple weeks ago I was at the point that I needed to quit or make a big change. I went with the big change. I pared my friend’s list down to people I truly wanted to be in touch with. Goodbye high school ex-girlfriends and classmates I didn’t talk to back then. Goodbye friends of my siblings who aren’t also actually my friends. Goodbye almost everyone. I went from 350+ friends (which is a pretty small number, I know) to just under 65.

It was the perfect move. I feel so much more comfortable sharing simple thoughts throughout the day and my news feed doesn’t get pounded with a bunch of shit I don’t care to read. Though it’s still early, I’d say the purge has helped my Facebook experience a great deal, and I don’t think I’ll consider getting rid of the service for quite some time.