Twitter tried to buy Instagram before Facebook did

 Last week, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, neutralizing an incoming threat for Facebook and making nine Instagram employees instantly rich. Apparently, Facebook didn't have any competition for this acquisition. Or did they? Not if a New York Times report claiming that Twitter tried to acquire Instagram in the months before Facebook did is true.

According to the report, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried to acquire Instagram in the months before Facebook tied up the deal, but they only managed to raise the price that Facebook paid to $1 billion. It's not hard to tell that Dorsey isn't happy about this; all his spokespeople declined to comment, and he no longer uses Instagram to upload photos to Twitter.

The report also includes information about how Instagram will change after its acquisition by Facebook. The app isn't going away, but it'll be working with Facebook to build the service. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that they'll try to "build on Instagram's strengths, not absorb its features." You'll still be able to post pictures onto other social networking sites, And yes, that list will include Twitter.

Graph Shows Tweets Containing the Word "iPad" During iPad Event

When a new, hot product comes out, we usually hear a lot of talk about it. And the amount of this talk can typically measure how popular a product is. Well, what if you could measure how much people were tweeting about a new product? You would get more data, and more accurate numbers to represent how popular the product is. Well, that's exactly what Twitter did; with the iPad 3.

Twitter released this chart today, showing how many tweets with the word "iPad" in them were posted on the day of the iPad event. The results are amazing. Before the event, a moderate number of iPad-related tweets, 1,000 per minute, were being posted. When the event opened, the number rose to 2,500. But during the event, the numbers were huge. The highest spikes, (over 10,000 tweets per minute) were when Tim Cook said "Next-Gen Wireless," and 9 minutes later when he said "Priced at just $499".

HTC 7 Pro to be Released Feb. 24!

February 24 isn't going to be a big day; it's going to be a HUGE day! Not only will the new MacBook Pro and the Motorola Xoom be released, but the HTC 7 Pro will be released! A recent tweet by Sprint claims that their next  phone will have a hub for gaming, music, pictures, and video. And it even assures us that the phone will be released on Thursday, Feb. 24! This phone has been waiting for Microsoft to complete its Windows Phone 7 software update, which lets you copy and paste, and includes CDMA support. This phone probably is the HTC 7 Pro, because the hubs must be the hubs found in Windows Phone 7, and the only Windows Phone 7 phone rumored to come to sprint is the 7 Pro.

2010 Tech Stats Frenzy!

If you love stats, you're going to looooove this post. Hold on to your hats. 107 trillion (107,000,000,000,000) emails were sent in 2010. That's 294 billion emails per day. But, 89.1% of those were spam. There are now 1.88 billion email users, and a whopping 255 million websites up. 21.4 million of those websites went up in 2010. Twitter is doing well, with 25 billion tweets getting sent in 2010. It also added 100 million users last year. Facebook is doing even better though; 30 billion posts went on the web, and 250 million users joined. And no, I didn't accidentally write billion instead of million anywhere there.