The social networking giant announced the upgrade to Facebook Photos in a blog post today. Over to the right, you can check out what Bambi looked like, before and after (click on image to enlarge).

There are a couple of limitations to this. For one, sharing high-res photos to Facebook is a Web-only feature, which isn’t much of a shocker, since many mobile photo files are compressed before sharing, and Facebook’s mobile app doesn’t include a lot of the features available on the social networking site. And on the Web, the full-screen photos can only be viewed using the latest version of Firefox or Chrome.

But for people who spend a lot of time creeping on — I mean, browsing through — other people’s Facebook photos, crisp, full-sized images may be a welcome addition. The maximum resolution for an image to be uploaded to Facebook’s photo viewer is 2,048 by 2,048 pixels — big enough so it doesn’t lose its quality when it expands to the scale of the browser screen.

Last year, it was reported that Facebook was considering adding photo filters to mobile Photos, but a spokesperson for the company says there’s no update on that.

The Energy and Commerce Committee today sent a letter to CEO Tim Cook asking that he send a company representative to Washington to formally brief it on just how it is protecting the personal information of mobile device users.

While Apple did address a number of the committee’s questions in a March 2 response to its first inquiry, new concerns have since arisen. Specifically, a loophole in Apple’s iOS operating systems that may be allowing some apps to access consumers’ photos and videos and associated location data without permission.

Apple will presumably address this issue in the same way it pledged to correct the address book data loophole that inspired this whole debacle in the first place: With a software update.

But somebody from Apple is still going to have to make a trip to Washington.

The committee’s letter in full below.

Mr. Tim Cook
Chief Executive Officer, Apple Inc.
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Dear Mr. Cook:

We have received and reviewed the reply of Apple Inc., to our February 15, 2012, letter requesting information about your company’s app developer policies and practices to protect the privacy and security of your mobile device users’ information. We thank you for responding to our letter.

The March 2 reply we received from Apple does not answer a number of the questions we raised about the company’s efforts to protect the privacy and security of its mobile device users. In addition, subsequent to our letter, concerns have been raised about the manner in which apps can access photographs on your mobile devices and tools provided by Apple to consumers to prevent unwanted online tracking.[1] To help us understand these issues, we request that you make available representatives to brief our staff on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

If you have any questions regarding this request, please contact Felipe Mendoza with the Energy and Commerce Committee staff at 202-226-3400.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Ranking Member

G.K. Butterfield
Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade

We learned that video games are good for you, that TV has ruined politics in the U.S. and that social media should fix it, and that Jimmy Fallon has different activities in mind when he thinks of “activity wristbands.” We learned how to be disruptive. We heard Google’s designers explain how they convinced their company to take on that infamous redesign.

We identified one of the worst marketing gimmicks in all of Austin (aside from this controversial one), and heard about all the crazy tasks SXSW-ers hired people to do for them. We learned that an impromptu Jay-Z concert will light up Twitter like it’s Arab Spring in Austin. We hosted not one but two parties at SXSW, announcing at the first event the new All Things Reviewed section of our Web site.

Since words can only say so much, we’ve put together a slideshow for you, below, and our full list of stories is below that:

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In addition, the company has added former Skype and eBay exec Michele Don Durbin to its team as vice president of marketing, as Eye-Fi eyes more international growth.

The capital infusion from NTT DoCoMo means Mountain View-based Eye-Fi is going deeper into mobile, after having originally made its footprint in digital cameras without Wi-Fi connectivity.

In April, the company said, NTT DoCoMo’s 59 million mobile subscribers in Japan will be able to use Eye-Fi to share photos between their digital cameras and mobile devices without needing to upload them to a computer. Eye-Fi will introduce a series of applications for both iOS and Android that will allow users to have an Eye-Fi experience without the card, Eye-Fi CEO Yuval Koren said.

“As you think about Eye-Fi and how we’ve evolved, we’re thinking about it as a service first and a device second, especially on connected handsets and smartphone platforms,” Koren said.

The partnership with NTT DoCoMo marks the second in Japan for Eye-Fi. Last fall, the company struck a deal with KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile operator, for unbundled app distribution to its mobile subscribers.

Eye-Fi’s focus on mobile comes as the company is facing a possible change to SD card standards that could increase competition for the start-up. In January, the SD Association, which represents more than a thousand companies that determine and promote SD standards, announced plans for a new Wireless LAN SD standard for full-sized and micro SD/SDHC/SDXC cards. Eye-Fi said that this proposed new standard violated Eye-Fi’s intellectual property.

A spokesperson for the SD Association told AllThingsD that there are no updates on whether the new standard has been approved, and that the Association is still following its normal process of evaluating disclosures received during the IP disclosure period.

Eye-Fi’s Koren would only say, “As far as we can tell, they are taking a serious look at the IP question that we’ve raised, and we look forward to their response on that.”

The photo-viewer started rolling out earlier this month, and appears to have been implemented widely in the last few days. Plenty of folks have noted that it’s similar to the format Google uses in Google+. I think the ad treatment is much more interesting.

Here’s the old format, via a Huffington Post screenshot:

And here’s the new one:

Those screenshots give you some idea of the new prominence the ads get, but it’s even more obvious in real life. Put it this way: I look at Facebook a lot, and I didn’t even realize that Facebook had been showing me ads when I clicked on photos. Now I can’t avoid them.

For now, that is. Entirely possible that I’ll develop the same “banner blindness” that I have for lots of other Web ads.

Also worth noting that these ads only seem to show up on photos that don’t have many comments on them. Photos that do have lots of comments display those comments instead. So if you’re looking at, say, pictures posted by Mark Zuckerberg, you won’t end up seeing ads next those images at all.

I asked Facebook reps for comment, and they offered a boilerplate response: “We’re constantly testing new designs and layouts on Facebook.”

So I’ll take the liberty of adding what they might say — if they had a beer or two and weren’t talking to a reporter: “See? This is one reason why you guys should trust us when we explain that we’re in the early stages of social advertising. If this format works, it means we’ll have opened up a huge slug of real estate we weren’t using. Boom! Instant revenue stream! And it’s also why you should just chill out about the fact that we don’t yet make any money from mobile. Of course we’re going to figure out how to put ads on your iPhone! We just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

Thanks, imaginary slightly tipsy Facebook rep! Look forward to chatting with you again soon.

We probably didn’t need a formal study to tell us that.

But that’s exactly what Tobii, maker of eye-tracking technology, set out to do.

The Sweden-based company, in collaboration with AnswerLab, recently pounced on a bunch of people at a San Francisco coffee shop and asked them to participate in a study in which they’d be examining the dating profiles of members of the opposite sex — and during the session, their eye movements would be tracked by Tobii’s sensors.

After participants viewed mock-up pages of eHarmony.com and Match.com profiles, the verdict was in: Men spent 65 percent more time than women did reviewing photos in profiles; women spent 50 percent more time reading the text about a potential mate’s background and interests.

Women also spent an average of 84 seconds gazing at a profile to determine if it was a match, compared to 58 seconds for men.

The study also revealed that people tend to like dating profiles that they feel are more reflective of the kind they would build for themselves. For example, people that prefer to share lots of personal info gravitated more toward very personal dating profiles, while those that stick to “just the facts, ma’am,” liked profiles that had simpler demographic info and data.

Tobii uses tracking technology that zeroes in on a user’s pupil and calculates the point of gaze using algorithms. For heavy blinkers or those with shifty eyes, the recovery time of Tobii’s sensor is between 100 and 300 milliseconds; it draws an “imaginary box” around the user’s head to account for lots of head movement, as well.

For more info on how it works, check out this video from D9, where Tobii general manager Barbara Barclay demoed how Tobii could help users control their laptops with just their eyeballs. Late last month, the company introduced its X1 Light Eye Tracker, marketed mainly to usability and market researchers.

To demonstrate the usefulness of its eye-tracking tech at the consumer level, Tobii is planning to conduct more studies and present more interesting use cases, Barclay said. The next study, for example, might be even more precise: Instead of examining who is looking at pictures versus text, the next study might shed light on which area of the pictures people’s eyes tend to linger on. (We know what you’re thinking right now.)

Ultimately, these types of studies could be most useful for advertisers, as well as Web companies.

The study showed that when there was a great deal of ad content on the right-hand side of a profile page, participants would be distracted by the ads and avert their eyes from the profile information. Great news for advertisers, but bad news for those who want to remain focused on the task at hand.

It’s important to note that the sample for this study was very small: The company managed to convince more than 40 people to try it out, but had to throw away a handful of samples due to inconclusive data, which can be caused by certain types of glasses, lazy or droopy eyes, or an extreme amount of gaze-shifting.

But Tobii’s Barclay says continued testing could help companies determine monetization strategies and how they might conflict with the ultimate goal of a Web site’s content, or to help advertisers make ads more relevant and boost click-through rates.

(Feature photo courtesy of Flickr)

The end of the pledge drive also means the end of those fundraising banners on every page that highlighted editors who contributed to the site.

Against the site’s normal black-and-white page design and absence of ads, the contributors’ color photos popped from the page and certainly fulfilled the goal of pulling readers up to the plea.

And while their absence won’t exactly be mourned by readers, it will deprive us of some entertaining juxtapositions, such as the one at right, with the visage of an earnest volunteer looking like an illustration accompanying the Wikipedia entry for a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring Justin Timberlake called “Dick in a Box.”

Wikimedia said it will use the funds to buy hardware, develop new features on the site, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects and support volunteers.

The site now employs 97 people and plans to spend $28.3 million this year on expenses.

The remainder of funds will trickle in throughout the year in the form of grants and other donations, such as ones from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki’s Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which gave $500,000 as part of the campaign in November.

In a letter thanking donors, Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote: “We’re the #5 most-popular site in the world — we operate on a tiny fraction of the resources of any other top site. We will use your money carefully and well, I promise you.”

How do I load family pictures into the Kindle Fire that I just bought for my 94-year-old mother?

A:

One of the weaknesses of the Fire is that it is heavily tied into Amazon’s cloud services, and, unlike Google or Apple, Amazon doesn’t have a cloud-based photo service. There are a number of work-arounds for getting photos into the Fire. Here are two. In my tests of the Kindle Fire, I found that the simplest method was to plug it into a laptop using a special USB cable (not included) and drag photos onto the Fire from the laptop. You also can save photos to the Fire that are attached to emails received on the device, but I found this didn’t always work.

Q:

Do you have any guidance about all-in-one touch-screen desktop PCs for the holiday buying season?

A:

I haven’t reviewed these in a long time, but take a look at Hewlett-Packard’s latest TouchSmart models, which seem well-equipped and start at $600, after various discounts. Note: I don’t know how well the touch screens on these PCs, or any others currently on the market, will work with the upcoming Windows 8, due out next year.

Q:

I have an Asus Transformer tablet and want to get Swype on it. How can I get it?

A:

Swype, which is an alternate keyboard for Android devices that works by letting you swipe your fingers across letters, typically comes preloaded on devices, rather than being installed by users like a typical app. The product’s site, at swype.com, shows how you can tell if your device came with it. If not, you can try installing a beta version by going to beta.swype.com.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Alas, Getty won’t say how many copies of this one it has sold. And it won’t provide any other details about the collection’s performance, like the number of photos it has licensed in the last two years, or the amount of money it has generated, or the way that money is split between photographers, Yahoo and Getty. So we’ll just end here.

Flickr, which has 68 million registered users, is “for people who care about photos,” said product head Markus Spiering.

So the Android app puts special emphasis on retaining high-resolution images, even if photo filters are added, and offers options to modify the flash, ratio selection, and shutter focus from within the viewfinder. Users can also scroll through their libraries of photos — though like on the Web, non-paying users can only see their 200 most recent photos.

Flickr previously released an iPhone app in 2009, which will be updated soon, said Spiering.

The other new Flickr feature, called “Photo Sessions,” helps users set up URLs they can share with rooms of 10 people where everyone can flip through, zoom in on and draw on photos in real time. So, for instance, a family could set up a time to virtually flip through an album of photos together and text-chat about them. Photo Session URLs last 24 hours and are only available in Safari (including on iOS devices), Firefox and Chrome. It’s kind of like Google Hangouts, without the video.

Yahoo’s Steve Douty, who is VP of applications and mobile product management, pitched the new Flickr features as part of a larger Yahoo strategy toward building an “interest graph” for its users and giving them “deeply personal digital experiences.” Yahoo had been a part of the Facebook platform announcements last week, and is now offering a personalized view of Yahoo News that shows users what their friends are reading.

But there are two problems with the image:
* Though the caption on the photo’s TwitPic page says it shows you what “the ground zero site looked like this evening,” that’s not true. De Guzman took the photo of the memorial a year ago.

* De Guzman doesn’t want people looking at the TwitPic image at all. Even though his name appears via watermark credit on the top right of the photo, he didn’t give “@DesignedMind,” the Twitter user who took a screengrab of the image, permission to place it there. If you’re going to look at the photo, de Guzman asks, please take a look at his SmugMug or Flickr pages.

Hold on. This is the Internet. Where ideas and images and information want to be free, right? If you don’t want someone to see something you’ve made, you don’t put it online, right?

Nope, says de Guzman, via an IM chat: “There are clear ways to share content on the sites I put my photos on: Flickr and SmugMug. I’d be ok if they had used what was offered to them.”

But since they didn’t? Last night, on Twitter, de Guzman was referring to people who reposted his work as “thieves.”

I’m quite sympathetic to de Guzman’s argument, because the digital content I make for a living is supposed to be consumed in specific places, too. But it frequently isn’t — it gets quoted without attribution, or lifted wholesale without links, etc. — and usually I just accept that as a downside that comes with the many upsides the Web provides for information makers.

And in many ways, images seem even more susceptible to misappropriation than any other media, simply because most people don’t ever bother to consider that someone, somewhere, created the image they’re now passing along.*

Add in the concept of “fair use,” which is both crucial and muddy for old and new media alike (de Guzman gave me the okay to use his image in this post last night), and you can see how tough it is for image makers to control their own work.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try hard to do the right thing. Particularly when it’s easy to do so. The New York Post, whose Twitter account linked to the TwitPic image last night and made the thing go viral, has now put up a new tweet linking to de Guzman’s Flickr account. Both the Post and this Web site are owned by News Corp.

* I’ve been just as bad about this as anyone, though I’m trying to improve. For instance: Turns out the monkey avatar I’ve been using on my Twitter profile for several years comes from graphic designer Andy Rainford. Andy reached out to me — very politely — this summer, and since then I’ve been crediting him on Twitter, and now again here.

It’s okay, you are probably not alone, but RealNetworks has not given up on its cloud ambitions. The Seattle company said Wednesday that the service is debuting now for Vodaphone customers in Germany and should come to the U.S. this fall.

Though clearly overshadowed by Apple’s iCloud, and to some extent by cloud services from Google and Amazon, RealNetworks said the promise of its service is the fact that it works on many different types of devices. The service is designed to allow users to do things such as play their iTunes library on their Android phone or share photos to Facebook.

“Customers want to be able to easily find and enjoy the media they own, no matter where it resides,” Interim CEO Mike Lunsford said in a statement. “With Unifi, they have the freedom to choose the phones, computers, tablets, services and platforms that best meet their changing needs -– and still have access to all of the media they love.”

RealNetworks demonstrated the technology at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in December.