In addition to collecting vast amounts of private user data from Facebook, Google, and Apple, the National Security Agency has demanded access to millions of un-filtered Instagram photos. A leaked email correspondence between a high-ranking surveillance officer in the NSA’s PRISM program and Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom was made exclusively available to The Faster Times.

“The NSA is concerned that the arty filters and special effects on your product are being used to conceal suspicious or illegal activity,” reads the email dated mid-April 2013. “We require that all un-filtered shots be made available to our data collection services.”

The officer then threatened legal action before concluding, “Respectfully, Mr. Systrom, you’d be amazed how many terrorist training camps you can hide behind a Nashville filter.”

Systrom turned down the request stating that the un-filtered original shots did not belong to Instagram, but did invite the NSA to “follow” him on the networking site.

An in-office email leaked from a later date showed the NSA’s frustration with Instagram’s decision.

“Systrom is building tools for espionage,” the unnamed officer wrote. “Frankly, if someone is using a Valencia filter, artificial frame, and a carefully-arranged tilt-shift for an alleged holiday photo, they must have something to hide.”

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In a press conference on Monday, Google announced that it has coerced its 500 millionth user into joining its social network, Google Plus.

“It has taken a lot of trickery and underhandedness,” said Google SVP Vic Gundotra, “but we finally made it.

So how has Google managed to gather so many reluctant users?

“We offer a lot of services that people actually want to sign up for,” said Gundotra, referring to such popular sites as Youtube, Gmail, Maps, and Blogger. “It’s now almost impossible to use the Internet without a Google account, and unfortunately for everyone, that means you have to sign up for Google Plus.”

More and more, users are finding themselves stuck between a rock and a fucking pointless social network.

“I just wanted to comment on that video of a cat singing ‘Gangnam Style,’” explained Google Plus user Rodrigo Evans. “And suddenly I was being asked to add people to ‘circles.’”

Other common reasons for accidentally joining Google Plus include “video-chatting my aunt,” “starting a food blog,” and “owning an Android phone.”

“My Google Plus profile is the first thing that comes up when you google me,” said Evans, whose profile remains bare. “It’s almost like Google’s blackmailing me into using their stupid social network.”

In addition to its 500 million unwilling users, Google boasts an additional 107 pathetic ‘early adopters’ who refuse to accept that the site is a depressing ghost town.

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A study of Instagram photos performed by the Social Media Analysis Center of Kentucky (SMACK) has revealed that the formerly ubiquitous “duckface” facial expression might soon be overtaken by “fishlips.”

The Center’s cutting-edge facial-recognition technology has analyzed thousands of selfies on social photography site Instagram and determined that the amount of fishlips has steadily risen over the past few months. SMACK projects that by August, fishlips will become the most common pose on Instagram.

Why has the facial expression suddenly become so popular?

“It’s really an amalgamation of the duckface and kissy-face,” explains SMACK Director Trenton Spick. “It’s also even harder to pull off than the duckface, which is definitely part of its appeal.”

According to the Center’s consultant, high school sophomore and volleyball player Kristen Bray, the trend originated with under-ten-year-olds.

“My little sister and her friends were goofing off, making fishlips in the mirror,” she says. “I knew right then that I could make it look hot.”

To make the pose, Bray advises pursing your lips, then sucking in your cheeks.

“It might not look good at first,” she says. “But there’s nothing the Earlybird filter can’t fix.”

The post Instagram Study: Fishlips May Be the New Duckface appeared first on The Faster Times.

“Statistically, people have their best ideas just before they die,” a Google spokesperson told The Faster Times. “We want to tap into this. With our new on-site intensive care unit and funeral services, Google will never miss out on those crucial deathbed ‘Ahah!’ moments.”

The first funeral at the Googleplex is already being arranged for a web technician who fatally crashed his Segway into the company’s koi pond. “This is what he would have wanted,” said a close friend and co-worker. “Instead of a eulogy we’re going to hold a casual brainstorm in his honor. It will be really tasteful.”

Recognizing the need to keep up with Google’s famous employee perks, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has announced plans to convert two floors at the company’s headquarters into an on-site crematorium. Said Mayer, “We want the world’s top tech talents to know that they don’t have to go to Google to die at work.”

The post Google’s New Office Graveyard to Make Dying at Work More Convenient appeared first on The Faster Times.

Yahoo—the force behind the epic destruction of hot startups like Flickr, Digg, and Delicious—is “overflowing” with ideas for how to destroy its billion-dollar acquisition, Tumblr, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

“I know that when I announced Tumblr’s acquisition, I wrote the words: ‘We promise not to screw it up,’” Mayer told The Faster Times. “But c’mon, I immediately followed that up with three rambling paragraphs about how I’m going to mash up Tumblr and Yahoo News like some Girl Talk project gone wrong. So how can anyone take me seriously?”

Mayer added that, though mashing up Yahoo News and Tumblr would quickly alienate Tumblr’s young user base while confusing the hell out of Yahoo News’s aging audience, there were just so many other ways they could screw this thing up.

“We’re literally bursting with ideas,” Mayer said cheerily. “Tom in marketing is so excited he hasn’t slept in weeks, though that may be because I haven’t let him leave the office ever since he asked to work from home while his daughter was sick.”

“Anyway, Tom thought we could have a buddy system,” continued Mayer, bursting with excitement. “Where every Tumblr user gets a brand buddy, like Adidas, that follows him everywhere he goes and watches out for him.”

“Or maybe we could get David Spade involved somehow. I don’t know, there are just so many possibilities.”

The post Yahoo ‘Overflowing’ With Ideas For How to Destroy Tumblr appeared first on The Faster Times.

“He’s so authentic,” says Bing Gordon, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led the $1 million series A funding round for Davis’ startup, Spare Ch@nge. “And I love that he’s removed all the complicated infrastructure and platforms around crowdfunding and taken it back to its essence: asking people directly for money.”

“This is the new wave in social,” says Mike Arrington, founder of Tech Crunch, which recently awarded Davis first prize in its Disrupt competition. Arrington is also an early stage investor in Spare Ch@nge, although he declined to disclose the amount of his investment.

When asked how he plans to enable that level of direct interaction between people Davis says: “You’re sort of salting my game here. No one’s gonna believe I really need change if I’m sitting here being interviewed by a chick in a suit.”

Authentic, indeed.

Photo credit

The post Homeless Guy Woos Silicon Valley VCs with Low-Tech Crowdfunding Startup appeared first on The Faster Times.

Hordes of interns left behind during the nine-day SXSW technology and music festival are still wandering the streets of Austin, attempting to hand out free sunglasses and stickers to passerby or find a couple of free tacos for their bosses. According to industry sources, most of the interns were left behind when their bosses abruptly realized that they were really fucking hungover and that their flight was leaving 90 minutes — although one executive at a major New York ad agency admitted that they simply hadn’t bothered to buy their interns return flights. “We carefully reviewed our trip budget, and it came down to paying for return flights for the interns or paying for our hotel bar tab,” admitted the executive. “Safe to say, I think we made the right decision. Although where the hell is my mail and coffee?”

The wandering interns have continued to follow the directions given to them on the first day of the festival by their bosses, before they started drinking for “biz-dev purposes” and forgot that the interns existed. “The same kid keeps trying to hand me sunglasses made by some stupid app every time I leave by bar,” complained Dan Franklin, a bartender at Maggie Mae’s. “I felt bad because the kid looked like he was in bad shape and needed a burger or something. But every time I asked him if he wanted to come in, he just responded by asking me to follow his app on Twitter.”

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Photo Credit: Orbitz

Target and Best Buy recently announced they’ll be matching online competitors’ prices this holiday season in their latest bid to draw back customers from leading online retailers.

Contrary to what some are predicting, brick and mortars may not be completely doomed. They’re on a mission to prove that “retail therapy” offers a more personalized experience that tops eBay’s. Word of advice: don’t ever lose your phone—mobile’s leading the way in this revolution.

Check out the top five reasons why you might actually leave the couch to go holiday shopping again someday soon:

1. The Age of Mobile Deals

“May I help you?” Um, probably not. One study revealed that, “45 percent of shoppers (up from 35 percent last year) said online peer reviews” play a major role in their decision to purchase a product. The good news for retailers (and snubbed sales associates) is that 43 percent of those people are pretty likely to snatch up promos and coupons. Expect too-good-to-pass-up deals on things you never knew you needed, and you’ll have to show up in store to get them.

2. Shopping is Personal

Back in the good old days, people went to local Mom-and-Pop shops where managers understood their customers. Today, shoppers can no longer expect to be greeted by name and shown a personalized suggestion from retailers. But that’s the experience we’ve grown to expect shopping online. How can retail compete? Through information gathering from social media, purchase history, and location-based marketing. Barnes and Noble and Starbucks are doing this now, with things like personalized book recommendations on receipts and mobile customer rewards.

3. Goodbye, Wallets

Fumbling around for exact change at the register and enduring death glares from those behind you, will be something from the retail stone age. Lines will be a lot shorter with everyone breezing through with nifty electronic “proximity payments.”

Again, you really don’t want to lose your phone. Ever.

4. A Shopper’s Testing Ground

Shopping trips shouldn’t require survival kits. According to Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner analyst, “Retail stores will be there for a ‘touch and feel’ experience only.” This means long lines will be a thing of the past, and products will be shipped directly to customers. Now there’s something online doesn’t offer: the chance to test a product in person before you buy. Oh, and go ahead and wear those stylish-yet-incredibly-uncomfortable shoes out shopping—small store stock means less space, so you won’t have to trek through miles of women’s underwear and jewelry to find the electronics.

5. The Customer is Always Right…No, Really

Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick recently told The Street, “Retail is becoming less about stacking boxes high and selling items at the right price and more about building an engaging experience for the customer.” The same article later suggests that stores are going to need to offer items,that are, “unique to the physical store.” Brick and mortar retailers might also start giving customers say in what they stock, a method called “crowdsourcing,” and it’s firmly rooted in social media’s “like” movement. According to Mashable, crowdsourcing is “the ultimate empowerment of the consumer,” and it’s one of the reasons why people love online shopping.

Might be time to take brick and mortar off the naughty list, shoppers.

The post Why In-Store Shopping Could Be Cool Again appeared first on The Faster Times.

The Siri I’m speaking with is a 24 year-old adult film actress who has been described as “the Christina Hendricks of porn.” She registered her stage name in June 2011, four months before Apple released its personal assistance app.

With a Tumblr blog (NSFW) and a flourishing Twitter account, Siri is one of many actors in the adult film industry using social media as a branding tool. CNN recently reported that 90% of porn stars are on Twitter. This combination of sex and tech is a social media geek’s wet dream.

Siri didn’t create an online presence overnight, but after her first year as an aspiring porn star, she has gained 18,600 Twitter followers, and her blog gets more than 100 questions and comments each month. There are a lot of upstart brands that would kill for those metrics.

With the help of her husband, Siri spends an estimated five hours each day updating her online profiles, and it has paid off. Because of her popularity with fans, Siri was voted Miss Freeones Best Newcomer for 2012.

You may think that building a social media following is easy when you’re selling sex, but aspiring porn stars trying to establish a buzz face plenty of challenges. The biggest hurdle: getting in front of a camera for a studio film. Siri created her Twitter account last summer and spent six months planning how to launch her career before moving from Texas to California. Her first scene wasn’t released until this past February.

“I would guess that I had less than 100 followers from the time I created the account until attending the AVN Awards in the last week of January,” Siri said. “Once I started shooting, fleshing out the blog, and posting photos of things, I was steadily gaining followers. A couple weeks into my first month of shooting, I remember waking up and realizing I’d hit 1,000 followers. That was the first big landmark.”

After the initial surge of support, Siri developed a social media strategy that provides her fans with what they care about the most.

“I don’t post a lot of random tweets. It’s usually a redirect link that goes to a blog post with a photo, an update about what I’m shooting, or a video clip. I almost always post actual content.”

On Siri’s blog, you’ll find naked photos mixed in with answers to fan questions and insightful opinion pieces. You can read about her support for gay marriage, her views on Internet piracy, and porn star karaoke nights.

Porn stars who moonlight as social media marketers are quickly changing the landscape of the industry. Adult videos used to be distributed only on VHS tapes and DVDs, but now, porn stars can market and distribute their own content, building a fan base that could lead to higher salaries from porn studios.

For porn stars who bare all on camera and then communicate individually with fans, social media can have its drawbacks regarding an invasion of privacy. Siri encountered plenty of “trolls” who made disrespectful remarks about her occupation or body just to upset her. The few instances genuine fans asked provocative questions, she politely declined to answer and set firm boundaries about what aspects of her personal life are off-limits. Surprisingly, it worked.

“The interesting things about these fans is that while they may not have realistic expectations of how well they can get to know me, they’re usually the most loyal fans,” Siri explained. “The last thing they want to do is annoy me or anger me, so when I do set a boundary, they’ve all been very respectful of that.”

Since Twitter and blogging are relatively new to the industry, porn stars are still figuring out how to best use the technology to carve out successful careers. Some have capitalized on social media to break into mainstream entertainment. Sasha Grey (370,000 followers) had a legion of fans before starring in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and landing a role in “Entourage.” James Deen (80,000 followers) was recently featured in GQ and will appear alongside Lindsay Lohan in the upcoming Paul Schrader film, The Canyons.

Siri is open to acting in non-pornographic films, but she’s not looking to go “mainstream.”

“Ultimately I want to have my own membership site,” she said. “My greatest hope is [to have] my own production company, because I want to have a hand in everything at some point.”

With a rapidly growing social media presence, Siri can accomplish her goals sooner rather than later. According to Family Safe Media, 28,528 Internet users are viewing pornography every second. That number may devastate parents and stiff Republicans across the country, but it also shows how big the market is for this new, entrepreneurial breed of porn star.

Siri is giving “start-up” a whole new meaning.

The post Social Media Helps Legitimize the Porn Industry appeared first on The Faster Times.

David had the good fortune to marry a writer who willingly shares of herself for a living. Despite my protests, he insisted we not post our wedding photos, wanting to keep some semblance of the sacred to ourselves. Not sharing our pictures meant that strangers wouldn’t even get a glimpse—we had 15 people at the ceremony and no one but the photographer had a camera in hand.

As a compromise, I posted one photo of me in my dress. It was taken through a mirror from quite a distance, but two things are clear: I look very, very happy; and my left palm is resting delicately on my slightly protruding belly.

A few hours after the shot went live, a friend chatted me up: “Are you pregnant?”

I haven’t spoken to this person since the sixth grade, when we co-choreographed a dance to the New Kids on the Block and performed it at the school’s lip sync competition. We lost touch more than 20 years ago—until, like so many of my generation, we found each other again through the long tendrils of the Internet.

In typical chat form, the question appeared as is, without pleasantries. There was nothing to buffer the stark fact of it, which, at 34, even asked by the closest friends in the best of circumstances, is fraught. (Let me add that this friend has two beautiful kids I’ve only seen online and will surely never meet.)

Why I couldn’t ignore such an inquiry by a virtual stranger in a medium that demands nothing of me will give you a glimpse into my psyche, but I worried (I worried!) about being rude. After all, she had “liked” so many of my posts over the years, congratulated me on my engagement and wedding, reposted many of my essays. I felt tethered to her in some real way, as I do to so many of the hundreds of people I read about regularly but haven’t seen in decades. “No!” I wrote. “Just fat, I guess!”

“Noooooooooooo,” she insisted. “It’s the hand on the belly.”

I took a peek at the image in question: yes, the ever-so-slight roundness could be misconstrued as a three- or four-month-along pregnancy. I reassured her that it was just…my body.

“Is it in your plans?”

In a world where people post photos of their fetuses, keep us abreast of their labor (“already 2cm dilated!”), share news of their dying parents and ask for love and support in their surgery or mourning, isn’t it natural to ask someone—a person you once upon a time loved very much—whether they’re pregnant, or wanting to be? Why not, when you’ve “shared in” so many otherwise private happenings in their lives?

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to walk away.

It isn’t news that in our increasingly public world many of us don’t know where to draw the line. Perhaps because I have recently moved abroad and feel my isolation more acutely, these online friendships have taken on a weightier significance—they have, at least temporarily, had to stand in for my complex flesh-and-bones relationships. Logging on once felt like checking in with a warm, extended family—fun, often informative, but basically innocuous. Now, the one-dimensionality of these connections feels bizarre and dangerous, like taking a slice off someone’s face and calling it a face. Whether this face is beautiful and successful, or failing and suffering is irrelevant—both are the distortions I falsely believe I am getting to know, one click and comment at a time.

Lately, when I hang out with friends I have had more contact with online than in our three-dimensional world, I feel myself pushing through a wall of information to get at the truth, the muck of it under the veneer, the actual person with a delicate heart. And I likewise find myself pulling back from commenting on acquaintances’ darkest troubles, reminding myself that it should never be that easy to insert yourself into a narrative that has more dimensions than the format could ever contain.

This pregnancy inquiry was, of course, a somewhat isolated incident—not everyone asks such things online, but increasingly they do. Because of what we publish about ourselves—and I am as guilty as anyone—we assume a level of comfort and familiarity that is not only potentially insulting, but misses the real point of connecting: to be privy to the intricacies and nuances of another’s life, the mess of trying to be a human being in a world with other human beings; to cultivate relationships where you earn the right to ask, and even seemingly simple answers can never simply be “liked.”

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