Soon after getting my long-awaited iPhone a couple of months back, I immediately started using Instagram, on the advice of a friend. It’s a great app to use but I wouldn’t say I am addicted. But there are people out there totally addicted to Instagram, people who see an empty McDonalds wrapper in the street and decide it’s art, and begin clicking away with their phone to get the perfect shot.

The fact that Apple is rolling in mountains of cash is hardly a newsflash. Just weeks away from bankruptcy15 years ago, it is now the most valuable company in the world with revenues that could sustain small nations or help to wipe out the US national debt. But you may be shocked to learn the extent to which Apple is rolling in the Benjamins. Even I did a double-take.

With all the hoopla surrounding Google Drive, and everyone going nuts over Dropbox, I think one other service is being sorely neglected – Evernote. Our Evernote coverage has been rather sketchy of late, and I think that’s a shame because in my opinion, Evernote is one of the best services out there on the Internet. It deserves to be appreciated more.

I saw an article the other day that described Pinterest as “a woman’s social network” with 60% of the site’s visitors being of the female persuasion. Why is that? Why do men find it unattractive to share photos on Pinterest while women go completely nuts over the site? Pinterest has seen a stunning rise in the social networking space, sitting in a very comfortable third place behind Facebook and Twitter.

Among the legendary lengthy staff email conversations that we have here at MakeUseOf, the one that became really long and really heated was on the subject of the Google glasses. The staff quickly split up into two camps – the pro’s and the anti’s – and battle commenced. I personally think the glasses are going to kick ass and when they come out for sale, I am probably going to quickly give in to temptation and buy myself a pair.

Back in January, the Internet got together in a co-ordinated effort to defeat a US Bill called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) which was making its way through Congress. When the Bill was finally brought to a screeching halt, everyone high-fived each other, convinced that the efforts by the US Government and various media companies [...]

There was a time when every businessman and his dog had a Blackberry. Having one separated the serious executives from the non-serious ones. Everyone started obsessively checking their email every 5 minutes, leading to a medical condition dubbed “Blackberry Thumb”. It seemed that Blackberry would be like Darth Vader and rule the entire galaxy. Now suddenly the company is doing an impersonation of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot.

I was watching Law & Order : Special Victims Unit on my iPhone the other night, when it dawned on me how lucky I was to be able to do what I was doing. I was watching a TV programme in crisp high-definition video, as good as watching it on television (perhaps better), except I was watching it on a small mobile phone screen, small enough to fit in my pocket. Video has come a long way.

These days, we are identified and judged more and more by how we appear to others on social networking sites. Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow us to brand ourselves in any image we choose to portray to people, such as potential employers, potential business partners and even potential spouses. So it obviously makes sense that, as part of that branding, you choose your profile picture very carefully.

The big news on the net this week that has got everyone talking is Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook for the absurd amount of $1 billion. Why absurd? Because Instagram has zero revenue, so how can anyone say that the company is worth $1 billion? It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg suddenly felt like buying something. Other people buy a puppy or a sports car. Zuckerberg drops a billion on a company with no revenue.

The Internet is progressing at such a blistering pace that by 2020, we are probably going to see a lot of changes, hopefully for the better.  For example, right now here in 2012, we’re seeing a vast amount of data being uploaded to the cloud, as more and more people abandon concepts such as hard [...]

We’ve made no secret of the fact that some of us here at MUO are big Angry Birds fans. Dave Parrack and I are currently battling it out on the Facebook version of the game (along with my wife, who is kicking my bottom) and with Angry Birds Space having just come out, even more people are getting addicted to the pig bashing game.

We all find it very convenient to order online from a site like Amazon. But once we press the “buy” button, we don’t give the purchase a second thought until it arrives, and if it’s late, we’re quick to raise hell. But have you ever wondered what happens exactly behind the scenes when you press that “buy” button? Check out today’s infographic which alleges some pretty horrendous working conditions.

I absolutely love PDF files as they are very practical. They’re easy to read, you can encrypt them, sign them, split, rotate and watermark them, merge them, and navigating a PDF is effortless. In fact, you don’t really need the very expensive Adobe Acrobat because there are lots of services out there that will create PDF files for you (Office 2007 for example offers on-the-fly PDF creation of all Word files).

Jimmy Wales must be chortling into his cheerios when he sees how his baby called Wikipedia has influenced so many areas of life, both online and offline. Despite the fact that Wikipedia seems to be on a neverending begging quest for donations, it is still the number one dominant site when it comes to reference articles, winning pub quizzes, cheating at homework assignments and assassinating 244 year old print encyclopedias.