New Instagram update adds yet another filter

A couple of days ago, Instagram created a furor by changing its ToS which set off speculation that the photo-sharing site was going to sell your pictures to advertisers and keep the money for itself. What made this believable was recent talk that Facebook was going to do something to monetize its billion dollar white elephant. As a public company, Facebook must put its shareholders first which means trying to squeeze profits out of Instagram. But by the end of the day, CEO Kevin Systrom had reversed direction and said that the change in the ToS had nothing to do with selling your photos to third parties and was all about experimenting with innovative advertising.

Now that the anger has subsided, Instagram felt it might be able to divert your attention by issuing a new update that includes yet another new color photo filter. Version 3.4.0 of the app comes with "Mayfair," a new filter that adds a touch of lavender to your photos and brightens up the center of them. The update adds support for 25 languages on the app, Facebook integration allowing you to share pictures with the social-networking site and also fixes some bugs that were infesting Instagram.

Filters were in the news the last couple of weeks. First, the previous Instagram update brought the "Willow" filter to to the site, while Twitter and Flickr both added their own new selection of filters in order to compete with Instagram. Flickr and Twitter's timing seemed perfect as they both added filters around the same time that you would expect to see a number of Instagram users looking for a new photo-sharing site. Truthfully, though, not that many people left Instagram as they decided to give the site the benefit of the doubt. Now that the photo-sharing site has done and said all the right things with its damage control, the update issued Friday is icing on the cake. When the dust settles, we wouldn't be surprised to see Instagram with only a small loss of subscribers over the last week.

The new update is available from iTunes and the Google Play Store.

source: GooglePlayStore, iTunes via BGR