Petrol-heads and girl racers, get ready for a pit stop online and take a look at the Car Show organised by Eagle One, the company that makes products to buff and shine your motor.

Much as we love a tasty set of wheels here on The Next Web, we’re not veering off topic for the sake of a shining set of rims. Eagle One’s Car Show is powered by Facebook, which means it taps into a huge audience for user generated content.

Participants can log into the Car Show with their Facebook account, add photos, specs and video of their pride and joy and see it rated on the site as others take a look around their vehicle.

If you prefer home-grown car rallies to the expensive, bonnet-bunny and dealership circuses, you’re probably going to enjoy competing or taking a look around the cars that others love to share.

You may wish to add top quality images of your supercar, fresh from the valet to compete, but for us mere-mortals there is room to gain top ratings too as there is a division for ‘dirtiest ride’. Users can collect trophies for other points of interest including, top wheels, top trim and top glass.

Part of the joy of owning a beautiful car is having others appreciate it. So if there’s diesel in your veins and you have the need for speed (within the parameters of the laws of the road of course) then you might find that this car show is a neat way to spend time while your motor is in the shop.

Check out the video for more details about how it all works:

➤ Car Show

Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called “Highlight” that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highlight lets the average user, not Pages or businesses, select an “important post” and “make sure friends see this”, but not color it yellow as Stuff wrote when it first spotted the feature. A tiny percentage of the user base is now seeing tests of a paid version of Highlight, but there’s also a free one designed to check if users are at all interested in the option.

Highlight could show Facebook’s willingness to try more aggressive ways of making money, which should delight potential investors. But Facebook is playing with fire here. The service has always been free for users, and a pay-for-popularity feature could be a huge turn off, especially to its younger and less financially equipped users who couldn’t afford such narcissism.

The official statement from Facebook on this is:

“We’re constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.”

I doubt Facebook is going to see positive reactions to Highlight, but if it did it could turn into an unpredicted revenue stream. Just the fact that Facebook would test this could bolster confidence for potential IPO investors. They want to know the company is interested in striking a more advertiser-friendly balance between a pure user experience and the goals of advertisers. That’s especially important now, as yesterday Facebook had to warn investors that its ad business is in jeopardy as more users access via mobile where it doesn’t show nearly as many ads.

[Update: I understand what Facebook was going for with this. Sometimes you have a post you really need people to see, like "I need a kidney donor", "I'm renting out my apartment", or "I'm moving to New York, come say goodbye tonight". If Facebook wants to give people the option to boost the visibility of the occasional post, it should let people Highlight one post a month, or apply some other frequency cap. But if people can pay to Highlight posts as often as they want, it could do more harm than good.]

The problem is the potential for Highlighted updates to reduce the general relevance of the news feed. Facebook’s news feed sorting algorithm is designed to show you posts by your closest friends or that have received a lot of Likes and comments. Highlight distorts this, and will encourage news feed spamming club promoters, musicians, small businesses, or anyone else with something to gain from more clicks.

How Highlight Works

If you’re in the test group and post a status update, you’ll see the “Highlight” option next to the Like and comment buttons below it. If clicked you’re shown the prompt above. Depending on what version of the test you’re seeing you’ll either get a free Highlight, or have to pay a dollar or two for the extra news feed prevalence. Facebook’s testing different price points, but users always pay with a credit card or PayPal, never with its virtual currency Credits.

Highlighted posts may appear higher in the news feed, stay visible for longer, and appear to more friends and subscribers. However, they’re not colored differently to make them stand out. And to be clear, this is not like Twitter’s Promoted Tweets which is designed for businesses. Facebook Highlight is for the end-user.

Luckily Facebook doesn’t seem to be betting the farm on Highlight, since the user who leaked the test was in New Zealand — a more isolated but English-speaking location where Facebook seems to test features it doesn’t want too many people to know about. That’s smart because it could erode the site’s sense of community. On Facebook, what’s supposed to matter is how interesting your posts are, not how deep your wallet is.

–

Other Big Facebook News:

Facebook Launches File Sharing

Find Great Facebook Apps In The New App Center

Facebook’s Messenger Mobile App Now Shows If Someone’s Read Your Message

As Facebook inches ever closer to its IPO — which some are projecting may be the biggest-ever in U.S. corporate history — there have been some slightly conflicting stories zipping across the ether today involving another Facebook story line: its $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram and a rumored Federal Trade Commission investigation into the deal: The FT is reporting that an investigation could delay the acquisition. Betabeat is reporting that this could actually delay Facebook’s IPO.

Could it be both? Either? Neither? We reached out to the FTC to get some info straight from the horse’s mouth.

For starters, it should be pointed out that the FTC can’t say one way or the other whether it is investigating the Facebook/Instagram deal. “The commission does not comment on investigations,” Mitch Katz, a public affairs spokesperson, told us. “You would need to check directly with the company.”

However, he did also note that as a matter of course, the FTC investigates all deals with a value greater than $68.2 million. That puts this $1 billion deal firmly into the investigating pile, then.

What next? Once the FTC — or, for that matter, the Department of Justice, which also routinely investigates M&A deals — does initiate an investigation, it can last for up to 30 days and the merger cannot go ahead until that investigation is terminated. (By the way, although the FTC can’t say when it is investigating someone, it can publicly disclose when it has terminated that investigation. Go figure.)

If, when the preliminary investigation period of 30 days is up and the FTC has not yet come to a decision, it can ask for a second request. This doesn’t necessarily mean something suspicious is going on, Katz told me.

“A lot of people think, if we issue a second request, that means we have problems with a deal. But that’s not true,” he said. “It may be that we just need more information to determine whether there are any competitive concerns. Issuing a second request is not an indicator there is a problem; just that we need more information.”

That information can be about the markets — here, social networks, photo sharing, and mobile — what the companies do, what their operations are, and whether they are competitors in certain markets and how their merger could impact competition.

The investigation can involve other companies also providing feedback — and indeed the Financial Times notes that “at least two” major competitors are providing information to the FTC for this (Twitter and Google perhaps?).

One thing that seems pretty clear is that the FTC’s investigation is squarely about the Facebook and Instagram merger — not Facebook’s IPO, which coincidentally Facebook is preparing for and is scheduled to take place on May 18.

Facebook could always delay the IPO, but that would be its decision — not something related to the FTC.

“Any potential investigation would be done independently [of the IPO plans],” Katz said. “The decision whether [the investigation] would have any impact on the IPO would be up to the company.” Given that Facebook didn’t expect the Instagram deal to close before the end of the second quarter anyway — that is, the end of June — it might not see the FTC nosing around as reason enough to delay its listing plans.

We have also contacted Facebook and will update this post with any further information that we get from them.

Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it’s got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive. Music and any copyright files aren’t allowed and file size is capped at 25mb, as Mashable first reported. But this is just the first version, and you can be sure Facebook will keep hacking away at it.

Last month, the social network started letting users share files within Groups for Schools, but now we confirmed with Facebook that within a few days all Facebook users should have the option to upload and share files from the Groups post composer.

Facebook users often talk about downloadable files, but now they’ll be able to share those Word docs, images, e-books, PDFs rather than having to upload them elsewhere. The addition of file sharing has been a long time coming, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously worked on a peer-to-peer service called WireHog, which was shut down due to concerns about copyright infringement. It also comes after Facebook’s acquisition of New York City-based file sharing Drop.io in 2010, which brought Sam Lessin on board.

File sharing could help Facebook fight its public image as a distraction from getting real work done. If you already have a Facebook Group to organize discussion about a class, work project, or vacation with friends, file sharing will fit right in.

You’re not going to be able to share huge home movies or zip files of photos, and sadly amateur musicians won’t be able to share their own creations with friends. But Facebook file sharing could be good enough for a lot of people, especially if it ups the file size limit, creates perma-URLs for files, and creates a tab in groups specifically showing shared files. Most important it would need extend file sharing to the general news feed to really become competitive. If it makes these improvements though, it could pull market share from other file sharing system by focusing on convenience.

There’s still plenty of use cases for the big cloud storage / file sharing services…such as sharing copyrighted files. Plus people might feel like their files will be more private on a dedicated service, even though Facebook Groups are quite secure. Products specifically for file sharing might always rule for business, but free personal usage that Facebook could chip away at has been a huge lead generator for enterprise sales. That’s why Facebook moving into the space could limit their long-term growth potential — something investors who sunk $257 million into Dropbox don’t want to see.

Let me be clear: this won’t kill Dropbox or reverse its stellar growth. We’re fans of the service and it won the TechCrunch Crunchie for overall startup of the year. But Facebook could make it hard for it become so popular that it could deliver to investors a serious multiple on the huge amount of funding its received.

The “good enough” approach is becoming a Facebook staple. It’s asymetrical, interest graph follow feature Subscribe was late to the game by years, but because it lives in the news feed where 900 million people already spend their time, it could stunt Twitter’s growth. The same thing could happen here. Facebook’s popularity and how deeply it’s ingrained our lives give it a big advantage. Power users may always crave specialized products, but for average joe, the option to send a file from the Facebook account they already have might be enough to stop them signing up somewhere else.

[Additional reporting by Ryan Lawler. Image Credit: How Stuff Works]

Once upon a time a company pioneered simple photo sharing. By allowing consumers to easily take and share pictures, photography became a part of everyday life.

Now, several generations removed, Polaroid is essentially an empty shell of the once iconic brand it used to be. The Instagram Socialmatic Camera is just a concept currently, but it attempts to revive the Polaroid movement with a little help from every hipster’s favorite mobile app, Instagram.

The large concept camera comes courtesy of ADR Studios, who modeled after Instagram’s logo (which itself is a play on Polaroid). Around the back of the camera is a printer capable of producing photos on sticky strips for quick and easy sharing. The camera would also feature 16GB of storage, a large 4:3-inch touchscreen, interchangeable lens, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity — all the goods needed for the ideal mobile Instagram machine.

The idea actually isn’t that novel. Polaroid and Olympus outed a very similar device in 2001 of course sans the touchscreen and the Instagram integration. That camera, the C-211 took pics, printed pictures and also had a pretty awful form factor.

Again, this is just a concept but as Freshness Mag points out, it would not be surprising to see something very similar hit Kickstarter in the near future with or without Instagram’s (and Facebook’s) permission.

Facebook began the process of rolling out file sharing for groups today, allowing you to share files of most types up to 25MB. This might be useful for the average Facebook user who doesn't want to leave the service to send someone a file, but there are several other services we think are much better. More »

Imagine a situation in which you find out your favorite photo-sharing app, say Instagram, is full of content not shared by the folks using the service but rather being pulled in from sites like Flickr, uploaded to dummy accounts, and marked as “popular”.

In the case of social video sharing app Socialcam, which represents itself as a user generated content sharing app, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Background & Context

When a service climbs the charts and starts racking up impressive numbers, you usually have an idea as to why that happened. In the case of Instagram, we can go back over the past year and a half and follow its rise to glory. In Socialcam’s case, it seems to have come out of nowhere, hyped by the fact that everyone is now looking for the “Instagram of video”.

When we reported that Socialcam had hit the #1 free app position on Apple’s app store, I followed up quickly with the fact that the company was using a marketing service called FreeAppADay to drive itself up the charts. Whilst FreeAppADay is normally only used by paid apps going free for a day (SocialCam is free), this type of non-organic growth isn’t “illegal”, and Apple doesn’t seem to mind. Once you get into the top five on the charts, you start experiencing organic growth due to the curiosity of those watching the charts for new apps to download.

Once you have a lot of users inside of your app, it’s hard to keep them. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that there’s great content for them to find. For a user generated content app like Socialcam, you’d think that the content would come from its users. Unfortunately, that might not be the case here.

It appears that Socialcam is pulling in YouTube videos to its service and passing them off as content uploaded by its users. A quick hop over to its website, and you can see that most of the “trending” videos are pretty old videos that are popular on YouTube. Some of these videos show upwards of 6,000 Socialcam likes, which would surely equal many more social Open Graph actions on Facebook.

How it all works

The way I stumbled onto this is that to view a Socialcam video in your Facebook Newsfeed, you have to sign up for the app, and it’s safe to say that these non-app users account for some of those 36M. It’s a practice similar to that of social readers used by Washington Post and it’s pretty annoying.

I’m also an app user and have social sharing off, so none of my video views or comments end up my timeline. However, when I accessed a video through Socialcam’s site via Facebook, social sharing magically turned back on, thus sharing this in the Newsfeed of my friends:

As you can see, it clearly states that this video was uploaded to Socialcam. There’s only one problem, there’s no way to upload YouTube videos to Socialcam, as it only pulls videos from your iOS device’s camera roll or live from your camera.

If you were to click the football video, you would be asked to register, if you’re not already a user, and then you’d be sent to this Socialcam page with a YouTube embed:

Once you do that, it’s then plastered onto your Facebook Timeline and Newsfeed, and so on and so on. This type of manufactured virality was obviously well researched and tested, because it has clearly accelerated the growth of the service itself.

But the obviously weird part is that the video that Socialcam said was uploaded just a few days ago is over 2 years old, and even includes the exact same title as its YouTube counterpart (down to the lowercase i):

What does this mean?

I have a few questions about this, mostly centered around how YouTube content got onto the service in the first place. For an app that is supposedly about user generated content, surely that shouldn’t include old popular content from another service.

The mobile experience is quite similar, as you can see:

I am also wondering what other tactics that companies like Socialcam may be deploying to get the wheels churning and users registered at such a rapid pace.

After doing some more digging, I was able to find some other folks who are wondering how the app has kickstarted numbers as big as they have and how the YouTube videos got there.

I spoke to Socialcam’s CEO Michael Seibel and he told us that “In order to win the video creation space, we have to understand the video creation space” and that the company was focusing on the “consumption” part of the video experience.

An open question to you: If you tie all of this with the fact that the company is openly paying money to climb the charts on the App store, is the service as impressive as we thought, and secondarily, what other tactics might it be using? A piece by InsideFacebook recently cited Socialcam as becoming the most popular app on Facebook.

The ultimate question however is, if you could potentially sell your company for a billion dollars. What lengths would you go to find success?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Squrl has released a new app that has optimized many of the features of its video discovery application for the iPad and made them available on the iPhone. It also hopes to increase engagement by allowing users to seamlessly share the videos they’re watching with friends on Facebook.

When Squrl released its first app about a year ago, most of its focus was on bookmarking videos and saving them for later. But since then, the company has moved more toward helping viewers find new videos that they might want to watch.

The new Squrl iPhone app simplifies that process even further, by reducing the number of steps it takes for users to key in on channels that they’re interested in. Squrl has narrowed down selected video options into channels that viewers can choose from. Instead of selecting from a wide range of video publishers at launch, users are now given a choice of eight categories: “Make me laugh” for comedy, “Show me the future” for tech news, and so on.

After choosing channels they want to watch, users are asked to connect their Facebook and Twitter accounts on the new app. If they choose to connect with Facebook, the app will also begin seamlessly sharing their activity with their friends on the social network. That’s a big change for Squrl, which TechCrunch knocked last month for “not being social enough.”

Importantly, the app doesn’t share the titles of individual videos users have watched, but instead highlights the publishers or channels that they’re focused on. That was a decision founders Mark Gray and Michael Hoydich made after seeing the reaction to some other video apps which have begun to take over users’ Facebook Timelines. It also seeks to give users more control over what they’re sharing on the network, allowing them to easily turn sharing on or off. The point is not to be spammy, or to make users inadvertently share videos on Facebook that they don’t want others to see.

That said, the hope is that being on Facebook will increase engagement between users, and, well, also increase the number of downloads and installations of the app. So far the Squrl guys have been focused more on the former, driving up the amount of time that their users spend with the app. On that front, things have been going smashingly well. Gray reports that users spend an average of about 50 minutes per session watching videos on the app.

Part of the reason for that session time is that users are turning to Squrl as a way to find videos which they then send to Apple TV via AirPlay. Viewers can browse videos from providers like Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, College Humor, and Funny or Die… And Squrl also recently added publishers such as Khan Academy, BloombergTV, Chow, DIY Network, and the Travel Channel. Amazingly, all those publishers work with AirPlay for now (fingers crossed things stay that way).

There are eight folks on the Squrl team now, and the company has been mostly self-funded to date, although the founders are talking about raising some money in the coming months. Best of luck to them — they’re great dudes.

The popularity of old-fashioned style pictures and retro-looking cameras has been growing quickly.

From apps to film cameras, retro seems to be all the rage. A bit like vintage clothing, old-fashioned photography is becoming ever more popular and desirable.

Instagram has been sweeping the news headlines, what with it being snapped up by Facebook and merging with Hipstamatic. It has perhaps highlighted the increasingly popular trend for retro photography, which seems to be powering through the industry and the world.

Grainy, saturated images appear all over Facebook, and Fuji even reported that the sales figures for film are not decreasing as they first predicted.

But it didn't all begin with Instagram - it just caught the wave of the existing trend.

Film cameras

Perhaps one of the initial emergents of the recent retro photography trend was Lomography's range of film cameras, such as the Lomography La Sardina and Lomo Sprocket Rocket.

Living for the 'point and shoot, just capture the moment' element of photography, these cameras produce instant film photographs with that aged, saturated look that is so desirable at the moment.

Photographer Peter Hong said: "I guess the main thing that pulls you into retro photography is probably the fact that it is different.

"We live in a world where we demand perfection. New cameras have got to be pin-sharp, well built, fast, ergonomically friendly, and so on. Retro offers the opposite. Film cameras aren't perfect; they aren't sharp. There is an excitement with film, of not knowing what you have taken until you get it developed," he explained.

So what's on the market for those who yearn for the smell of film and aesthetics of instant retro photos?

Lomography is perhaps the first port of call. Its latest range includes LomoKinoScope, Lomography Fisheye One Blue, Fisheye One Green and La Sardina Camera & Flash - Belle Starr, all of which are available to buy right now.

Another popular competitor on the film market is the Fujifilm Instax Mini 7S, which produces the similar instant toy camera-style photography.

Retro look cameras

Film isn't for everyone, but there is a wide range of digital cameras that are harking back to days of old with their designs.

If you want a DSLR disguised in film's clothing, then the Fujifilm X100 is dressed in a black leathery coating over a silver frame, giving it that all-important retro look.

A spokesperson for Fujifilm explained: "The retro design of the X100 was inspired by the functionality and ergonomics of cameras from the past."

Adrian Clarke, senior vice president for photo imaging at Fujifilm, said: "I think people loved the styling of it, they thought it was a great combination of smart retro looks."

Another camera to consider is the Fuji X-Pro1. Again it encompasses the retro style, and also has a traditional aperture ring and shutter speed dial.

The Olympus OM-D E-M5, meanwhile, harks back to the 1970s and its own original OM range.

Panasonic on the other hand, told us that it tends not to produce retro-looking cameras because it's a new brand and is keen to be taken seriously in the photography arena.

If inner beauty is more your thing, then there are a number of cameras available that have artistic filters.

The Olympus PEN Lite E-PL3 has a modern look and creative filters that enable users to give their photos a grainy film finish or the old-fashioned pin hole camera look.

This also applies to the Olympus PEN E-P3, which has an added Cross Process filter for recreating an old film processing trick.

The Samsung WB700 has an interesting array of artistic filters, including vignetting, Old film 1 and Old film 2.

If you're looking for a compact camera with a bit more punch, the Panasonic Lumix LX5, offers filters called Retro, Pin Hole and Film Grain.

Retro apps

It's no surprise that the phone industry noticed this retro photography trend and decided to join in.

The iPhone offered up Instagram, an app that is now extremely popular and has recently also been made available for Android. By installing Instagram, mobile users snap a picture using the iPhone's camera and then select a certain type of filter to apply to the photo. The photo is then intended to be shared across the social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Retro style photos appeared all over these social networks, demonstrating the love for the old-fashioned style of photography.

Its popularity grew with the recent merger between Instagram and Hipstamatic, to produce an advanced editing and retro photo sharing experience.

Hipstamatic had essentially the same idea as Instagram, enabling users to create retro-looking photos that could be easily shared among friends.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom explained that: "A trend was emerging in users editing their photos with Hipstamatic before uploading to Instagram - and establishing such a partnership made sense."

With the trend for retro photography still growing, it's worth hedging a bet that the market will see more apps and more retro cameras in the future.