Bump, the app that lets people interact with one another by using their mobile phone, noticed that a feature of its app got extremely popular – photo sharing, which it launched two years ago.

The app is best known for sharing contact information by bumping your phones together, which is a geeky way of replacing paper business cards. But the photo sharing aspect of Bump is something that its 90M users found handy.

I spoke with Bump’s co-founder and CEO David Lieb about a new feature that the company launched today, the ability to bump apps to your desktop. He told me that its user share 2M photos a day using its app, so the company wanted to make it easy to share photos in other ways.

Instead of being known as the contact sharing app, Lieb told me that Bump focuses on “Solving real-world problems for things you want to do easily.”

With this new feature, I think Bump has done the job. Here’s what the team had to say on its blog about it today:

When we talk to people who use Bump, they often tell us how they love that Bump just makes sense to them. If they want to share a photo with a friend or family member, they don’t have to understand complicated technology — they can just bump their phones together. But one of their biggest complaints is that it is hard to get photos off their phone and onto their computer. Syncing is complicated and often requires a cable you just can’t find, and people are fed up with emailing their own photos to themselves. Users would often jokingly tell us, “Bump is great; if only my computer could Bump too!”

So we built it.

I’ve been playing with the new feature for the past few days and I have to say that it’s completely awesome and such a timesaver. For example, when I review an app, I take screenshots to post here on The Next Web. Usually, I end up emailing them to myself.

Apple’s Photostream for iOS is handy, but I take so many photos and screenshots that I’ve used up the room on it. Plus, it’s nice to be able to select just the photos I want for whatever I’m doing at the time.

By visiting the Bump photo page, you can simply choose a few photos on your app and then tap the computer’s spacebar with your phone to start the connection:

Once you’ve tapped the spacebar with your device, you’ll see the connection dialog on both your computer and the device:

The rest is magic. Your photos are beamed to your computer and you’re then able to download the files, share them on Facebook and Twitter, or grab a link to send to whomever you like:

You seriously have to try this out because it’s really awesome. Since I started using this feature, I’ve already saved a bunch of time.

➤ Photos Bump

Photo apps are the hottest thing out there right now. Ever since Instagram was purchased by Facebook, people have been wondering if it the door is now closed for other players in the space to emerge. Similarly, video apps are also getting attention as the next space that’s ripe for big acquisition things, with Viddy in the driver’s seat.

One up-and-coming app does both photo and video and is seeing some impressive growth that is about to explode thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph and Timeline integration. That app is Israel-based Mobli, which has been available for about seven months.

When I met with the company, it told me that it just hit 2 million monthly active users, and has just launched its new Facebook features, so that number should go through the roof as we’ve seen with other apps that have done the same.

The company has some interesting investors and advisors, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Lance Armstrong. Mobli has raised 4M to date, and is set to expand its functionality for its iOS, Android, and BlackBerry app that lets you share and discover photos and videos based on topics that interest you.

Set to take on both video and photo apps

The thing that stands out to me about Mobli the most is that it is already on iOS, Android, BlackBerry mobile platforms with a plan to expand to Windows Phone soon. In addition, it has a really nice web version that’s fully functional. I truly believe that even mobile app networks need a Web destination, something that I always thought would have gotten Instagram even more traction.

The app itself is set up to let you follow people and discover content based on subject channels such as sports, pets, or music. This is a bit different from other apps too, which are entirely relying upon the fact that you’re following your friends or are interested in the most popular content. You can definitely lose yourself in Mobli for a few hours.

When you’re shooting a video or photo, you’ll be thrown into a feature called the “darkroom” which is Mobli’s editing suite. Much like you can alter photos with other popular apps, Mobli lets you do the same. The secret sauce the company tells me is that all of their filters are server-side, meaning they can add new filters on the fly without having to update any of its apps, which is brilliant.

You can also import photos from Facebook and Instagram and share it on the network as well. Adding those photos into channels is great way to repurpose content that you’ve already taken and shared on other networks.

By “watching” both channels as well as people on the Mobli network, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll never run out of things to check out. I personally enjoy spending extra cycles looking at my Instagram feed, waiting for someone to post something.

While sometimes it’s ridiculous to call something “the next big thing” for the sake of doing so, Mobli has the functionality, features, backing, and user growth that will only make great things happen for the company. The people that use the service absolutely love it and enjoy sharing photos on Facebook and Twitter using it. That’s the magic that a lot of popular apps have seen, and I bet that even Instagram would attribute most of its success to its community.

If you’re looking to place bets on what the next popular video or photo app may be, it might be all wrapped up into one with Mobli.

➤ Mobli

As expected, more of Google’s products are getting the social treatment with Google+ functionality. The latest project to get further “Plussed” is Gmail, and the features are actually quite handy.

The “people” widget that shows up when you hover over one of your friends in Gmail, will now include thumbnails of recent photos and videos they’ve posted on Google+, along with the other recent updates they’ve shared.

Here’s what the team had to say about the feature:

Gmail and Google+ are both great places to share images and videos with your friends, and we’re always looking for ways to make this easier. We’ve been showing recent Google+ posts in the people widget for some time, and a few weeks ago we added the ability for you to share YouTube videos from your email to your Google+ stream.

Today, we’re expanding recent Google+ posts in the people widget to include thumbnails of the photos and videos shared in the post. We’re also making it easier to share inline images in emails — just hover your mouse over the image in your email and you will see an option to share it on Google+. We’re still rolling out the update, so if you don’t see it yet, sit tight.

Here’s what the people widget might look like once the feature hits your Gmail account:

The ability to share an inline image from your inbox by just hovering over it is a handy addition to the share button that Gmail added for Google+ last year.

This is further proof that Google is all about social, and there’s no turning back now. It’s also further proof that when people are using any Google product, they’ll also be a Google+ user, whether they visit the destination site or not.

Even if you don’t follow Playboy on Twitter, you have probably heard about something the company does every Friday using the hashtag #FriskyFriday. Basically, Playboy asks ladies to share pictures of themselves and then chooses a winner at the end of the day.

The company gets tons of entries and needless to say, a bunch of interaction around the content. The story behind how the phenomenon got started is an interesting one that starts with Playboy’s current Social Media Manager Allie Sullivan. That’s right, a guy didn’t start all of this madness.

Sullivan’s story begins with getting the gig of a lifetime at Playboy, turning it into a case study for brands in any vertical, and proof that consistency definitely catches an audience.

The Next Web: Can you tell us how and when #FriskyFriday got started and why?

Allie Sullivan: When I was applying for my social media position at Playboy in the fall of 2010, I had to create a two-year social media plan as the final piece of my interview, and the concept of #FriskyFriday was part of that plan (though at the time I envisioned the hashtag #FlashFriday, yikes!). My goal was to have it kickoff with one Playmate, see how it was received, and invite other Playmates to participate, which would naturally lead to Playboy model participation and female fans as well.

Once at Playboy, I started working with the 2010 Playmates to give them advice on how they could use social media to garner more votes for the online portion of Playboy’s Playmate of the Year 2011 competition. Miss November 2010 Shera Bechard, now one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends, was one of the Playmates that I spoke with and was open to anything, so she was the perfect Playmate to encourage to post a sexy pic on the same day every week, with a fun name so that fans would come to expect and get excited for her pics. That was the only direction that I gave Shera and that week, she posted her first sexy-self shot with her camera phone for FriskyFriday, though the hashtag didn’t come about for a couple months.

For two months, I retweeted Shera’s FriskyFriday picture from Playboy’s Twitter and after a couple of weeks, our followers were asking for it first thing Friday morning! It was time to get more Playmates involved, so Shera and I reached out to her Playmate sisters asking them to join the fun. We started using the hashtag #FriskyFriday so that our followers could view them by checking the retweets out at Playboy, or by simply following along at the hashtag. The hashtag was also an easier way for me to monitor the pictures coming in, since we have over 120 Playmates on Twitter, who tweet a lot throughout the day!

After about two weeks of a dozen Playmates posting their #FriskyFriday pictures, Playboy models started tweeting us their #FriskyFriday pictures too, so we started to retweet them. Our followers were in heaven, they started asking us if it was #FriskyFriday on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Our male following wasn’t the only audience who took notice of #FriskyFriday, our female followers, Playmate and Playboy model hopefuls, started tweeting us their pictures every Friday, and since a Twitter hashtag is opened to all on Twitter, my thought was the more, the merrier!

The Next Web: What type of engagement numbers do you see on Fridays and how has it grown over time?

Allie Sullivan: In 2011, I grew our Twitter account by 300% and the majority of that growth has #FriskyFriday to thank for. If you look at a graph of @Playboy’s weekly growth, you will see that on average, Playboy’s daily followers triple every Friday compared to every other day in the week. When we first started #FriskyFriday after inviting Playmates to join Shera in posting pictures, we would retweet anywhere between 8-12 images on a Friday. Now, we typically retweet about 60 images, retweeting anywhere between 5-10 minutes over 10 hours. There are at least 50K @ mentions on #FriskyFriday, around 350K clicks on tweeted links retweeted by Playboy every Friday, and our weekly Storify posts generate an average of 50K views.

While the success of #FriskyFriday has definitely helped fan engagement, site traffic and follower growth for both Playboy and participants, we’ve also been able to monetize social media through #FriskyFriday. We have worked with our Playmates to create dozens of sponsored #FriskyFriday campaigns, where I give them direction and sometimes props, as well as text and hashtags to use for their tweets. For example, we have worked with HBO for the season premiere of ‘Entourage,’ Spike TV’s show ‘Ink Master,’ and recently, American Pie’s newest movie, ‘American Reunion.’ Our female fans all over the world often catch on to the themes and participate too, giving our advertising clients added value, as well as entertaining our Twitter following in a natural way.

The Next Web: Do you do anything similar on Facebook, if so, how is the interaction different than Twitter?

Allie Sullivan: We do not do anything remotely similar on Facebook as a lot of the images are ‘implied nudity’ which is against Facebook’s guidelines. We do however post and link to our #FriskyFriday weekly Storify post on our safe-for-work blog, www.TheSmokingJacket.com, and it is one of our most liked features on our Facebook page (It’s also wildly popular on Playboy.com I’m told).

The Next Web: Are you thinking about expanding the hashtag efforts into something daily?

Allie Sullivan: Right now there are no plans for that. #FriskyFriday is great because, one I am only one person, but also because our fans look forward to it every week. Having a daily hashtag would take away from the magic of #FriskyFriday. There are hashtags for every single day of the week for aspiring models to post pictures to Twitter, but having one day, and one hashtag that recognizes Playmates, Playboy models and fans is the way to go.

I am leaving Playboy at the end of the month, and while I will miss the baby that Playmate Shera Bechard and I created, I have to admit that I look forward to having my Fridays back! I hope to see Playboy continue to improve #FriskyFriday and for it to grow and get more popular as time goes on.

Twitter + Consistency = Success

While the content that Playboy focuses on is clearly the type that draws eyeballs and attention, there’s a lot to be learned from what Sullivan has done during her time managing the social media direction of one of the world’s most popular brands.

It will be interesting to see where she ends up next, as I’m sure that her services are in pretty high demand after seeing what she’s done with #FriskyFriday. You might think that by having lovely ladies to tweet all day would equal immediate success, but Sullivan has clearly put a great deal of work into curating the photos that are sent in.

Even if you’re not a fan of Playboy, you have to be quite impressed with the longevity of the campaign, and how it’s opened the doors into new ways of generating revenue for the company while making its customers even happier.

Last year I wrote a post called “Calling all startups! What are we going to do with all of these photos?” and it seems like the market has responded with new photo apps launching daily, along with huge acquisition deals being made for them.

Even though Instagram is “off the market”, there are still a bazillion things we can do with photos, and I love apps that focus on one little nuance and do it well. I found an iOS app today called Jittergram that isn’t a social network, probably won’t get purchased for a billion dollars, but does something new and fun with photos that caught my attention.

What Jittergram does is let you take two photos, back-to-back, and then presses them into an animated GIFT that acts like a 3D stereogram. Not sure what that means? Have a look at the photo below:

While this practice is nothing new, I do enjoy how the app does all of the work for me and allows me to share it easily on Twitter. This type of photography brings the scenery around you to life in a way that a single still photo and filter can’t.

Staring at photos like this for too long you might become a bit motion-sick, but I enjoy the fact that Jittergram is stepping out and trying something new. If filters can catch on, why not something as simple as this?

However, the app could have had a bit more love put into it with some social networking features of its own. I still think that Instagram nailed the idea of building a community around photographers, which has been copied over and over again, but without a community, it’ll be impossible to see all of the cool pictures that people take with Jittergram.

If this takes off as a “thing”, hopefully the team will put a bit more effort into it. Until then, tweeting your photos or emailing them to a friend is good enough.

➤ Jittergram for iOS

If you’ve ever uploaded a ton of photos to a service like Facebook, Flickr, or even Google+ itself, you know that the more you upload, the harder they get to manage. Some photos end up being placed in the wrong album or as time passes you’d like to duplicate them in another album or move them there permanently.

To allow those easy changes, the Google+ team has announced the launch of its new album organizer which lets you move photos from album to album or just change the order that they’re in for when your friends and family go to check them out.

Here’s what the team had to say about it today:

Rearranging photos and moving them between albums are two of our top feature requests. Today, we’re excited to launch an album organizer so you can better tell the story of your photos.

To get started, open one of your albums and select Organize album from the Options menu.

Once you’ve entered “organize” mode within a photo album, you can sort photos by time, drag and drop them to create your own order, move or copy photos to another album, or delete a group of photos at once:

Google+ Photos, which has replaced Picasa on the web (Picasa still exists as the desktop client to manage photos on Google+), is one of the services most used features.

For photographers, which seems to be a huge niche of users on Google+, uploading hundreds of photos and sorting them is a pain. The album organizer serves some of their needs by letting them manipulate many photos to create other albums to present them to their followers.

The feature is being rolled out to all users and may take until the end of the day to reach the entire userbase but keep an eye out for it. This is just one change that the Google+ team has announced today, the other being Google Docs integration with Hangouts.

At an event in San Francisco today, Path’s CEO Dave Morin discussed a new release of its moment-sharing app Path.

The new features in the new version of Path 2.1, now available on the App store are:

★ Nike+ GPS Running Stories — Automatically journal your runs from Nike’s GPS app to your Path. Learn more: http://path.com/nike
★ Music Match — Easily identify and share the music that’s playing around you, even if you don’t know the song.
★ Focus & Exposure — Adjust the camera’s focus and exposure points separately to help compose your more detailed photos.
★ Introducing Pow! — A new camera lens that creates a comic book effect.
✓ Tap and hold on people’s profile pictures in comments and seen its to view at full size.
✓ Activity when family and friends listen to your music stories or play your videos.
✓ Pro, Ansel, Instant, Diana, and Lomo lenses have been greatly improved.
✓ Beautiful high definition camera preview.
☂ Bug fixes.

Morin says that photos are the most popular items on the platform to share. Unfortunately, the new camera features aren’t available for Android just yet.

The big news however is that Path has launched its API, which is only available to Nike right now. The company is starting out small and wants to keep things private.

Path will now sense when you’ve started your morning run when using a soon-to-be released version of Nike+ and will post to your stream automatically. Using Nike’s technology along with Path, your run will be mapped, allowing your friends to “cheer you on”.

Path will also be integrating the Nike FuelBand into its app, which is a huge win for the company and a massive partnership for the team.

The new Music Match feature is similar to what you’ll find in the popular app Shazaam, which lets you tap a button and record a snippet of music, and then have the information about the song identified for you. The feature is powered by Gracenote.

The company continues to grow, saying that its 2M users have shared 100M moments that have been shared over 1B times. Regarding the limit of only having 150 friends on the platform, Morin said that its users love it, and the average number of friends for each user is “way less than 150″.

When it comes to opening the doors to its API for more partners, Path says that it’s not in a rush to go completely open and will probably take more of an App Store approach to how partnerships are made.

Before there were location-aware fads apps like Highlight and Glancee, there was a company who focused on creating chatrooms on the fly based on where you were located. Think AOL chatrooms with people who were ten feet away from you. Yobongo pioneered the notion that you may want to strike up a chat with the people who are in the same room with you, but aren’t necessarily people that you know.

A year has passed since the “Great Group Messaging War of 2011” and Yobongo has been acquired by online photo book software company Mixbook. The marriage of the two companies isn’t as odd as you’d think though, since three members from Yobongo’s team previously worked at a startup called Scrapblog, which was also purchased by Mixbook last year. Specific terms of the deal were not made available, but Yobongo investors will become investors in Mixbook.

Yobongo had raised $1.35M in seed funding from top tier investors like Mitch Kapor, Dave Morin, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, and True Ventures.

The Yobongo team will get to work on creating a mobile scrapbooking experience for photos on the Mixbook platform, once that has seen some impressive growth as of late. Here are some interesting factoids as of February of this year:

5,000,000 Mixbook projects started
10,000,000 products shipped
100,000,000 pages designed
250,000,000 photos uploaded
10,000,000 hours spent on Mixbook

Here’s what Yobongo co-founder Caleb Elston had to say about the acquisition:

It has been a whirlwind year and a half. It began with Dave and me hacking away at coffee shops, then joining forces with our incredible investors and all along building a team of the most talented product builders out there. Today, we are excited to start a new chapter in helping people communicate. Together with Mixbook we will accelerate our efforts to help people communicate with their photos.

The entire Yobongo team will be joining Mixbook in Palo Alto and we couldn’t be more excited. Mixbook is the best way to quickly and easily create beautiful customized photo books, cards, calendars and more.They’ve quietly been building their company and they are absolutely crushing it.

Yobongo isn’t the only SXSW-Hot group messaging app from last year to have an exit, Beluga was purchased by Facebook right before the event, and GroupMe was purchased by Skype.

The service will be shutting down and letting its users know when that will take place.

In September we told you about a new exciting startup that aimed to host all of your photos in a beautiful and elegant way. That startup, Snapjoy, has announced a new feature in a big way, and it’s shooting an arrow directly at Yahoo!’s Flickr.

Up until now, you could only directly upload your photos to Snapjoy, and it would use all of the meta data from the pictures to build a gorgeous timeline. Today, with a site it calls “Flickraft“, Snapjoy wants to offer you a way to get all of your Flickr photos onto its service.

The site sports an artistic rendition of the “SS Flickr”, Snapjoy’s way of saying that Flickr is sinking like the Titanic. According to the site, 48,863 photos have been “rescued” so far.

The site clearly is meant to grab attention away from Flickr, but the new tool works flawlessly, allowing you to bring every single one of your photos over to Snapjoy for safe keeping. And at least for right now, it’s free.

Once you sign up for an account on Snapjoy, you can then authorize it to work with your Flickr account. All you have to do after that is sit back and relax while Snapjoy does the importing rescuing.

Once you’re done, you’ll be presented with this screen:

So there you have it, for everyone who has been ready to take the dive away from Flickr, now’s the time. Thanks to Snapjoy, this process is now, well a snap.

➤ Flickraft

In case you haven’t heard, Yahoo! announced its new CEO today, Scott Thompson. Talk about walking into a storm of acquisition rumors and drama on your first day. Luckily, Thompson was formerly the President at PayPal, so he’s used to sticky situations.

The company says that Thompson will be tasked at focusing on its “core business”, but nobody knows exactly what that is, including Yahoo! What should their core business be? Mobile communities could be potentially lucrative and forward-looking to start.

If I were the new CEO at Yahoo!, I’d give the folks at Instagram a call and make them an offer on the spot.

Here’s why:

1. It could strengthen Flickr

Flickr isn’t “dead”, but it has become extremely stale. In an interesting post today, well-respected blogger and photographer Thomas Hawk wrote an open letter to Scott Thompson, asking him to save Flickr.

One of his best points was:

Flickr represents your *BEST* possible chance for social at Yahoo, but it’s probably too late.

I’m not so sure it’s too late if Yahoo! were to purchase Instagram and bundle it together as the web version of the popular photo sharing community. Not only are you getting a killer service that was Apple’s #1 app last year, you’re grabbing a team that is expanding impressively. With this team of giants, Flickr could be saved and put back on track. See, the Instagram team completely understands social, community, and comprehends how ripe the world of photography is for innovation.

What has happened at Flickr is sad, there are no voices guiding its community and the innovation on the site has come to a complete standstill. The community will eventually move elsewhere if it doesn’t start getting some TLC.

2. Mobile user acquisition

If one bought Instragram, 15 million users come with it. However, it’s not the quantity that makes sense for Yahoo!, it’s the quality of users it could acquire.
Instagram users are share-hungry, and by looking through the popular photos section of the app, it appears to have a strong hold on younger demographics. For example, Kylie Jenner (the youngest of the Kardashian bunch) has such a huge following on the app that it no longer displays her total number of followers:

Fans of people like Jenner and her Kardashian family would be a perfect fit for Yahoo! properties like omg!, which serves as its celebrity news and gossip hub:

While this is only one example of demographic and content matching that Yahoo! could take advantage of by buying Instagram, it’s quite a powerful thought. By working really hard on building out a mobile community, Yahoo! can sprinkle its supporting services in to create more of a well-rounded ecosystem of content-sharing social people. Plus, Flickr saw 78,895 photos from iPhone 4 cameras uploaded to the service yesterday alone, so there’s a strong opportunity to go bigger with mobile.

3. Cut the crap and do one thing really well

Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s very difficult to do a ton of things at once. Just ask Google about how long it has taken to glue all of its services together with Google+. It’s not impossible to stitch services like email and search together, but you must have a core competency that you can fall back on. I would say that having a strong mobile community would be a smart bet for that “one thing”.

While I have no idea if either side has any interest in working together, it would make a whole lot of sense for Yahoo! to double down on social and mobile, and those goals can be gained by acquiring Instagram. The fact that the company already owns Flickr, a once-successful photo sharing network that could benefit from such a deal, is just a cherry on top.