Yesterday, Facebook announced that it acquired Instagram for $1 Billion. The company is less than two years old, has no revenue, and about a dozen employees. Remember, acquisitions are about what the acquirer can do with the company in the future, not some multiple of revenues or profits today. Why is Instagram worth $1 billion?

Facebook acquired Instagram for about $30 per user, or $1B. ($30/user X 33M users = $1 billion) Facebook is valued at about $100 per user or $80 billion ($100/user X 800M users = $80 billion). Other popular social apps are valued around $20 to $50 per user. The monetization models need to work out about the same to justify the valuations.

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The official Tumblr app was a late-comer to Android, and, sigh, hasn't kept pace in the years since. That's all changed. Today's update simply puts the iOS version to shame. Surely this lead can't last.

Tumblr for Android has a spiffy new user interface, which look and feel -- including post-type icons -- is more like the social network. The revamped UI is the real deal; well close to it. The app is speedier, and that includes photo browsing as well as loading blogs and posting to them. By comparison, Tumblr for iOS looks ugly and lacking. Access to Tumblr Radar from the Android app rocks. Still there are omissions that favor Tumblr for iOS, such as audio uploads. I'm surprised this feature isn't available on the Android app (Wasn't it once?).

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That's the question I will answer this week, for myself, as I kiss off RSS subscriptions, press releases and the like in favor of social media and honest to goodness live interaction. The moratorium includes Google News, which I rarely look at anyway (although some of my colleagues are obsessed with it). Press releases, blog posts, etc. that I see on social networks (including blog comments), or someone refers me to, are fair game.

The objectives are simple: To see if RSS feeds are antiquated and to increase my social engagement, which too often is limited to coworkers and the stories I manage. Hey, I work at home, where the grind makes dust of real interaction unless it is pursued. Aggressively.

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Are you 35 and claiming to be 29? Don't post photos to Facebook. Today Face.com added a new attribute to its facial-detection API: age detection. The startup claims the new attribute will let developers create apps that use three criteria -- minimum, maximum and estimated age -- to determine how old people are in photos.

While the technology surely will appeal to social networkers, the big boon could be marketers looking to maximize exposure to select demographic groups, such as 18-24 year olds. Developers can set the attribute to look for specific age segments, hence the marketing potential. But there are others, such as detecting fake IDs at establishments serving alcoholic beverages. Additionally, Face.com claims to have improved facial recognition by 30 percent in this release of the API.

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Inspired by the look of Windows Metro, MetroTwit is a unique-looking, clean Twitter client that oozes style and simplicity. The app has just hit version 1.0, having already proved itself to be worthy of note in the beta stages. The official release sees the addition of a number of important new features including highly configurable filtering that helps you to ensure that your stream is not cluttered up with tweets you are not interested in.

In a similar vein to TweetDeck, the MetroTwit interface includes multiple columns that can be used to display different aspects of your Twitter account, and there is great integration with Windows 7 that sees notification area popups revealing direct messages and other interactions.

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It's a serious question, following today's stunning privacy post from Facebook. Has an employer or prospective one asked you for your Facebook password, or that of another social media site; could be Google+, Tumblr or Twitter, among others?

The request might have come as condition of continued employment, and there threat of reprisal might seem, or even be, real given the current job market. Or perhaps a prospective employer said that you couldn't be considered for a new position without first giving up your password. Please answer in comments. This is one of those rare occasions I don't mind, and even recommend, anonymous commenting if answer is "Yes". There also is a poll. Please answer, and you can choose multiple responses.

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Reports of prospective employers asking for Facebook passwords during the hiring process or as terms of employment has the social networking site upset. Facebook says asking for your password is a violation of privacy, and very well could set up the employer for legal action.

Criticism of the practice came to a head earlier this week following an Associated Press story detailing several individuals who had been subjected to disclosing their passwords to either obtain or to keep a job. Employers' attempts to peer into your social life has the attention of lawmakers too: in both Maryland and Illinois legislation is being considered to make the practice illegal.

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It used to be that there were numerous chat clients to choose from -- the likes of AIM, MSN and Yahoo! -- but nowadays there are also social networks to consider. Trillian has always been a great tool for anyone who wants to keep in touch with friends that are using different chat networks, and support for this likes of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more has been added as the app has developed over time.

This latest update not only fixes a number of known problems, but also improves the app’s support for Twitter. The Twitter engine has received an overhaul so there is now support for native retweeting as well as the userstream.

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The popularity of Facebook shows no signs of abating, and after annoying a large percentage of its users with the forced introduction of the timeline, the social network has released a Windows app to help irate visitors fall back in love with the site.

Facebook Messenger for Windows is a standalone app that provides access to your online friends ready for chatting and keeps you up to date with everything that is happening with your Facebook account without the need to visit the site itself.

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Over the past year, we've witnessed a convergence of social, mobile and cloud computing prompting organizations around the globe to evaluate how they embrace the growing social business market. "Social" has become essential for organizations that want to remain competitive.

Reflecting on the clients I've met across 66 countries, five things surprised me about companies embarking on the social business journey.

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I don't know what's stranger, Pizza Hut's Valentine's Day marketing gimmick or one of our editors finding it on Facebook. BetaNews FileForum managing editor Eddie Elmore consistently drops interesting links into group chat. The link to the Pizza Hut promo churned up so much discussion among the staff, I had to post.

If you're willing to pay Pizza Hut $10,000 and another 10 bucks for a Dinner Box, the restauranteur will help you propose marriage. Besides the food, you get a ruby ring, limo service, flowers (hey, it's Valentine's Day), photographer, videographer and your own fireworks show. My question: What if he or she says no. You want to be damn sure of the answer beforehand.

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Well, it took long enough. Google waited until passing 100 million G+ users before opening a platform developer page. What? You think only Facebook has a social network platform agenda? Google has ambitions, too.

Perhaps the big thing will be the weekly Hangouts, where Google+ developers can get the lowdown. It's nothing on the scale of Microsoft's Channel 9 (Say didn't Vic Gundotra have a hand in both Nine and G+?). Channel 9 is more about broadcasting developer information, while Hangouts are live and more interactive.

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In a major update to its privacy policy and the addition of "Search Plus Your World", Google has managed to attain the consensus from the tech-enthused world that it is way beyond the innocent baby days of "don’t be evil". Matt Honan of Gizmodo signalled the privacy shift as the end of Google’s "don’t be evil" promise, which the company built its business on, and Sarah Lacy of Pando Daily shared similar sentiments, though hers was related to the Search Plus Your World outcry.

In a nutshell, one of the biggest sore points that people are having with Google’s new privacy policy is the fact that it permits the search giant to utilize your basic profile information and extend it across your identities when using your other Google services. These changes aren't so much evil, but adaptation to our merging online and offline identities.

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Are you ready to pay for Facebook? You just may. Analyst Foad Fadaghi of Telsyte, an Australian technology research firm, tells news.com.au that premium accounts are an option to increase revenues.

As I argued on Wednesday, Facebook now must answer to shareholders. Being a public company is a completely different world from life as a private company. Fadaghi also expects Facebook to make advertising more invasive, as investors demand better performance. Ain't that grand?

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Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, takes a slightly different approach to social content organization and management, and includes a couple of new APIs to let application developers surface social network data.

If you've got ICS running on your phone already, you have probably already noticed the "People" application, Android's revamped contacts system that unifies different social networks and methods of communication under a single profile, allowing information to be more centrally located on a user's phone and shared out when needed.

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