Social media mishaps

TWITTeR users have long been plagued with unwanted posts and suspicious links by spam accounts but there was always an easy remedy at hand. Users could block the accounts and that would prevent spammers from accessing their profiles or posts.

However, on Dec 13 Twitter replaced the blocking feature with a mute function. The company made the change because it feared that the act of blocking would invite retaliation from the person that was blocked.

This allowed accounts that were previously blocked to view or tweet at the person who blocked him or her but the person would be oblivious to it. According to Reuters, Twitter CeO Dick Costolo said that the new feature was widely requested by the victims of block-abuse.

However, a large part of the Twitter community did not take the change well as they deemed it as a breach of privacy, as blocked users could now reaccess their profiles. They aired their unhappiness on the company’s social network with the hashtag #restore the block to get Twitter to restore the service.

And Twitter was fast to respond — it released a statement saying that it “never wanted to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe” and restored the blocking service within 24 hours.

Facebook Home

In April, Facebook introduced a launcher for Android phones called Home which displays the social network’s feeds on the smartphone’s screen. Home basically functions like other Android user-interface overlay such as Samsung Touchwiz and HTC Sense but it integrates Facebook feeds and posts into home screen.

While this is a great idea, the app has been plagued by bugs and problems from day one which has made it unpopular with early adopters.

Till today, the app continues to receive bad reviews from users.

Facebook a step further when it worked with HTC to introduce the first Facebook phone, aptly named the First.

It was released in limited countries and sales were so bad that it was discontinued soon after and we have yet to see a Facebook phone since then.