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Popular iOS app Timehop has finally made its way to Android today. Timehop is an app that allows you to see what you were posting on a variety of social networks exactly one, two, three, and four years ago. The app requires that you log in with your Facebook account, but can connect to Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare to see what you were posting.

Timehop helps you celebrate the best moments of the past. What were you doing a year ago today? Two years? Three years?Timehop brings together your old photos and posts from your iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Foursquare and replays your past a day at a time. You’ll quickly fall in love with checking your daily Timehop. Give it a try today!

You can only view your posts from one, two, three, or four years ago, not anyone else’s, which is somewhat disappointing. But Timehop says the point of the app is to be somewhat of a time capsule for your social networks. If you want to bask in your social network awkwardness, the app is available on the Play Store now.

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Want to stay on the dangerously cutting edge of social software on Android? Boy, does Facebook have an offer for you.

Announced today, Facebook is opening its Messenger app to beta testers on Android and looking for feedback on its user experience. The program aims to cast a wider net on catching bugs before they ship to general public. While testers will likely have a bumpier experience than users with the general release version, there’s potential to test unreleased features that might never make the public edition.

1. Join the Facebook Messenger for Android Beta Testers Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/messenger-for-android-beta-testers
2. Allow beta downloads by clicking “Become a Tester” in the Play Store (you need to join the Google Group before becoming a tester)
3. Download Facebook Messenger from the Play Store to update your app
4. Turn on automatic updates, as the beta version of Facebook Messenger for Android will be updated multiple times per week

Facebook launched a similar program for its main Android app last summer.
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Anyone who has friends that use iOS has probably heard of QuizUp. QuizUp is a simple trivia game that rocketed to the top of the iOS charts, but left many of us disappointed in the lack of an Android client. Today, however, the developers have finally released an Android version of the app to the Play Store.

The Android version of QuizUp is nearly identical to the iOS version. After you create an account, the home screen presents a variety of popular trivia categories. Categories range from sports to music to food and so much more. If you have great success in a certain topic, you become ranked higher, which can eventually lead to titles and badges. The game has great social integration, as well, allowing you to play with your Facebook, Google+ and Twitter friends, in addition to random opponents from around the world. The app also supports Google Play Services, which will share your activity to Google+.

Join over 10 million people who play and love QuizUp! Challenge your friends and connect with other players around the world in the largest real-time trivia game ever. Go head to head with over 200,000 questions in over 400 topics, ranging from your favorite TV shows and books to sports and music. New topics are added every week so QuizUp will surely test your knowledge while keeping you entertained for hours on end!

QuizUp is available for free on the Play Store now. You may notice that there are in-app purchases, but these are simply XP boosters. They don’t affect the actual gameplay at all and are not necessary at all.

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Sundar Pichai at D: All Things Digital conference

Despite widespread reporting that Google bid and failed to purchase WhatsApp ahead of Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of the messaging platform company, Google SVP Sundar Pichai went on the record during a panel discussion at Mobile World Congress to put that claim to bed, The Telegraph reports.

“Whatsapp was definitely an exciting product,” he said. “We never made an offer to acquire them. Press reports to the contrary are simply untrue.”

The source of the reports that Google attempted to pick up WhatsApp for $10 billion source back to a report by Fortune citing “two separate sources” claiming Google had previously underbid Facebook.
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Image: mobilegeeks.de

Update: TheInformation is reporting that Google was willing to beat Facebook’s $19 billion offer. More behind a paywall here.

Google tried to buy messaging service WhatsApp for $10B prior to Facebook’s successful $19B bid, according to two separate sources cited by Fortune. It has also been reported that Google had earlier offered WhatsApp “millions of dollars” simply for the right to be informed if WhatsApp received an offer from anyone else, an offer the messaging company turned down.

The size of the offers seem almost incredible given that the app is free and has no ads. Its entire revenue stream depends on users signing up to a 99c annual subscription after their first year, giving it – at present – a revenue ceiling of $450M a year.

But it’s likely that WhatsApp’s real appeal was it provides access to a core market for the future: mobile-first users in developing markets … 
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As the clock continues to click away to January 1st, we’re taking a look at our last top 9to5Google subject post of 2013. This time around we’ve saved the best for last as we look back at the last year in Android and the top 5 most read stories as determined by you, the 9to5Google reader. Perhaps the inevitable news is that 3 out of 5 or 60% of the top stories surround KitKat and its release. There were quite a few happenings in Android this year, but none more notable than the launch of the latest version of Android which has long been known as Key Lime Pie. Ultimately, Google decided on KitKat and announced the release with a partnership with the KitKat candy bar…which is exactly our kind of partnership. Facebook took its own stab at Android this year with Facebook Home and the HTC First, a story we’ll get to a little later on. I think it’s safe to call 2013 more of an evolutionary year in Android more so than revolutionary, but still another year where the platform surged in growth and adoption.

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http://vimeo.com/81527238

During its press event held in New York City today, Instagram announced a new sharing feature called Instagram Direct that will allow users to share images and videos to other users privately.

The new sharing model will require users to follow each other to send photos and messages privately to individuals or groups of up to 15 people. A pending requests inbox will catch photos and messages from users who are not mutually connected.

Instagram also noted its growth from 80 million users to 150 million users worldwide from the start of 2013 to today. Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, also boasted that over half of Instagram’s users use the service daily…

Instagram on its new Direct feature:

From how you capture photos and videos to the way you start conversations through likes and comments, we built Instagram Direct to feel natural to the Instagram experience you already know. When you open Instagram, you’ll now see a new icon in the top right corner of your home feed. Tap it to open your inbox where you’ll see photos and videos that people have sent to you. To send a photo or video to specific people, tap the camera button to enter the same simple photo or video capture and editing screens. At the top of the share screen, you’ll see the option to share with your followers (“Followers”) or to send to specific people (“Direct”). To send using Direct, tap the names of the people you want to send your photo or video to, write your caption, tap “send” and you’re done.

After sending, you’ll be able to find out who’s seen your photo or video, see who’s liked it and watch your recipients commenting in real time as the conversation unfolds.

Instagram Direct will be available in Instagram 5.0 for Android on the Play Store today.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has joined Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, Yahoo!, Facebook, and other giants in the tech industry in calling for a reform of the NSA’s surveillance tactics. Earlier this year it was revealed that the National Security Agency was using information from these companies and more to monitor citizens across the nation without warrants.

The companies allegedly involved in the “PRISM” program denied turning over any user data to the government, but a leaked NSA slidedeck (seen above) seemed to imply the opposite.

The new collaborative campaign, called Reform Government Surveillance, cites five driving principles in its drive to curb excessive government spying:

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A brand new Facebook test build is making its way into the wild and with it comes a flatter redesign. The boys at Android Police have a brief look at the redesign and its pretty easy at first glance to recognize that a lot has changed.

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Following a report back in July showing that Google+ gets only 2 percent of social sharing, new figures from Shareaholic (via Marketing Land) reveal that the service drives an average of 0.06 percent of all referral traffic. This contrasts with Facebook at 8.11 percent, Pinterest at 3.24 and Twitter at a surprisingly low 1.17.

Google+ traffic is also growing at a far slower rate than other social media.

Shareaholic also says that Google+ is growing the slowest as a referral source at just 6.97 percent over the past year. Referrals from Facebook (58.81 percent), Pinterest (66.52 percent), Twitter (54.12 percent) and YouTube (52.86 percent) all grew more than 50 percent since September 2012.

Viewed against a backdrop of Google’s aggressive promotion of the service, making it virtually impossible not to have a G+ account by linking it to every product the company has, it does make me question whether Google+ has a long-term future … 
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Amazon has long been said to be working on a smartphone carrying its brand, and it looks like it HTC could be its hardware partner.

That’s according to a report from the Financial Times, which cites people familiar with the project in saying that three different smartphones are currently in development with one being “at an advanced stage of development.”

“We have been very focused on building our own brand, but we have also been very open to co-branding and collaborating with carriers and other technology brands,” HTC chief of marketing Ben Ho told the Financial Times, but declined to comment on any specific relationship with Amazon.

Shipping a phone with both the HTC and Amazon logos would mean more than just branding for the phone, as Amazon would be able to take over much of the Android operating system experience as it has done with the Kindle Fire tablets. HTC partnered with Facebook earlier this year for the not-so-popular-now HTC First featuring Facebook Home, but borrowing software features from the Kindle Fire like Mayday, an Amazon support service for users, could prove valuable to both HTC and Amazon and be very appealing to new users in a saturated smartphone market.
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Google has announced a change to its terms of service that will allow the company to use your name, photo and company endorsements to be included in ads from 11th November (via the NYT).

When the new ad policy goes live Nov. 11, Google will be able to show what the company calls shared endorsements on Google sites and across the Web, on the more than two million sites in Google’s display advertising network, which are viewed by an estimated one billion people.

If a user follows a bakery on Google Plus or gives an album four stars on the Google Play music service, for instance, that person’s name, photo and endorsement could show up in ads for that bakery or album … 
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Zuckerberg recently announced that the company had plans to bring content from additional online sources to the lock screen for those using Facebook Home, and today that feature has officially been introduced in the latest Facebook for Android beta release.

At first, Facebook is adding content from Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram to the Facebook Home lock screen allowing users to swipe through photos and posts alongside Facebook content. Here’s how it works:

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Increased competition in digital advertising doesn’t seem to be hurting Google: the company is on track to increase its market share to almost 33 percent this year, with a commanding 53% in mobile advertising. The projections were made by research company eMarketer based on an analysis of company reports, though both dollar and percentage figures are slightly down on its earlier predictions back in June … 
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Facebook announced today that it’s starting a beta program for its Android apps that will allow users to sign up to test and provide feedback on the latest build of the app before its released to the public.

Facebook is the most-downloaded app in the Play Store, so we need to make sure it works for everyone, no matter their amount of RAM, network conditions, or version of Android they might be using. Factors like data costs and network speeds are especially important to users, and we want to make sure we’re always optimizing their experiences. With so many use cases to solve, testing becomes crucial to ensuring positive, consistent experiences across Android.

While Facebook noted that it has been providing a beta of its Android apps to partners such as Qualcomm, HTC, Ericsson, Sony, Huawei and MediaTek over the last six months, starting today all users can now sign up to become beta testers.

If you’re interested in signing up, go join the newly created Google Group called Facebook for Android Beta Testers and allow your device to download the latest beta by selecting “Become a Tester” on Google Play. There’s also a Facebook For Android Beta Testers group on Facebook. 
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The Federal Trade Commission has sent out a letter to 20 search engines informing them that they are not properly distinguishing the ads in search results from the actual results themselves. Back in 2002, the FTC doubled down on paid listings in search results, forcing search engines to clearly show a difference between the two, but the firm believes that since 2002,  companies have fallen back into their old habits. “We have observed a decline in compliance with the letter’s guidance,” the agency said in the letter.

The FTC has now issued new guidelines for search result ads, saying that things such as borders, shading, and text labels must be different when compared to true search results. The agency pointed a finger at Facebook’s new Graph Search feature, saying that “Regardless of the precise form search may take in the future, the long-standing principle of making advertising distinguishable from natural results will remain applicable.”
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