President Barack Obama has joined photo filtering social network Instagram. He joined Instagram this past Tuesday around the same time that the GOP campaign in Iowa took place. You can follow the President’s campaign account on Instagram at @BarackObama.  President Obama has 4 Instagram photos and over 30,000 followers as of right now.  President Obama’s campaign team is encouraging people to use the hashtag #Obama2012 when taking Obama-related photos.  President Obama is known for using social media as a way to spread the word about his viewpoints when campaigning.  President Obama has accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Tumblr.  [Mashable]

You may have already noticed this, but Apple released their iTunes Rewind 2011 this past week, which lists the top selling apps, TV shows, movies, music, and podcasts from the past year. Angry Birds is obviously the winner on the iPhone and iPad. Facebook won the top free iPhone app award. Instagram, the mobile social networking app that revolves around photo filters, has been awarded the “iPhone App of the Year.” Other applications that have won awards includes Tiny Wings, Fruit Ninja, Cut The Rope, Doodle Jump, Plants vs. Zombies, Pandora, CNN, Skype, Netflix, Twitter, Pages, Snapseed, and Garageband. [TechCrunch]

Mobile application Socialcam is considered to be an “Instagram for Video.” Instagram is a mobile application where you are encouraged to take a photo, add an interesting filter to that photo, and share it with your followers. But what happens to Socialcam if Instagram decides to launch video filters of their own. Should Socialcam be worried?

Followgram has created an infographic that showcases some fun facts about Instagram. Click on the image to enlarge:

Today is a big day for Klout. The social influence calculator just added five new networks to its algorithms, bringing their measurement possibilities to 10 total networks. Adding Tumblr, Blogger, Flickr, Last.fm and Instagram to the already-included Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and YouTube means that some Klout users are about to see a huge jump in their scores. The staff blog reminds users that “connecting an account will never lower your Score, but it may increase it as we can give you credit for your influence in that network.” TechCrunch notes that Google+ is still missing from the list but that it should be on its way soon.

Amazon‘s Elastic Computer Cloud and Relational Database Service went down yesterday, interrupting service for Amazon Web Services users like Netflix, Reddit, Foursquare and Instagram. PC Mag reports that service was disrupted around 10pm but back online around 11pm. The service error occurred when network traffic was moved to a lower-capacity network instead of shifting to another router, which downed servers in Virginia.

Photo app Instagram has now reached 150 million uploaded photos. The app launched only nine months ago, has more than 7 million users and is still only available from Apple’s App Store. Instagram is popular for its filters, which TechCrunch reports are used on 80% of the uploaded photos. [photo via Instagram's blog]

Justin Bieber has joined iPhone photo service Instagram, posting under the username “swagisme.” The teen pop idol chose to upload this photo of some unsuspecting cars with the caption “LA traffic sucks.” [instagr.am]