A technical bug in the Facebook inappropriate photo reporting tool, caused private photos of users to be visible to non friends. The bug allowed you to click on a profile picture of any user to report it and then brought up a screen displaying other private non public shared photos the user could browse through to report as well.

The bug meant that users could access other users’ private photos even though they were set to private. CEO and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, was used to demonstrate the exploit and caused many of his private photographs leaked to the internet. These photos included photos of him and his long time girlfriend, his dog, him and Barack Obama and even photos of him holding up a just slaughtered chicken.

Facebook has since responded with the following statement:

“Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously. The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos. This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time.

“Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.”

World of Avatar which owns shares in an array of local mobile and internet startups such as FSMS and Toodu, has bough out Herman Heunis, and MIH Holdings – a Naspers subsidiary, for a reported unconfirmed R500 million. Knott-Craig Jnr is set to take over the reigns as CEO from Heunis and said that he will not make drastic changes to the popular IM service in the coming few months.  “In the short-term, we want MXit to maintain and grow its position as the largest mobile social network in Africa. This means a focus on consolidating and strengthening the core of the business before we move to implement the long- term strategy.” said Knot-Craig Jnr.

MXit currently has over 45 Million registered users in more than 12o countries making the largest social network in Africa. More MXit message gets send every day than tweets and users spend more time on MXit then they do on Facebook.

Congrats to Herman on selling, and good luck for the future to World Of Avatar.

After several motorist struggled to get petrol at several service station in Johannesburg and Durban, a new Twitter hashtag was started and is turning out to be a huge success on providing motorist with the latest information on where fuel is available.

Twitter users are using the hashtag #gotpetrol to notify other users on the micro-blogging social network where they got fuel. If you are on Twitter and in an area that has fuel shortage and happened to find a service station that has fuel, why not tweet with the #gotpetrol hashtag and spread the word.

Follow the #gotpetrol hastag below to find service stations with fuel.

Yahoo may not be the search giant it used to be back in the day, but it has some awesome tools, and one such tool is its address book. See, Yahoo is a Facebook partner and because of that they get access to certain info users apps using the normal Facebook API can not get hold of, like the email address of your friend.

Exporting your Facebook friends to Google+ is a fairly easy operation, but it does involve a few sites.

1. Create a Yahoo! Address Book account.
2. Log into Yahoo! Address Book and click the Facebook Import Contacts button.
3. Authorise Yahoo! to access your Facebook data.
4. You should now have gotten a message saying x amount of contacts was imported.
5. Log into Google+ and head to the Circles section.
6. Click on the Find and Invite tab and then click on the Find Friends: Yahoo! link.
7. Authorise Google+ to access your Yahoo! contacts and they should now appear in the list.
8. Add them to a new circle called Facebook Friends and then post an update to that circle.

As easy as that and you will have all you Facebook friends in Google+, however they may not receive an invite as Google only opens invites every now and then, but atleast when they join Google+ one day you will be following them already.

If you are on Google+ you can follow me here.

It seems like the young billionaire has had a change of heart, or so the New York Times have reported. According to the New York Times, people briefed on Facebook’s plans say that in coming weeks the company plans to introduce a free iPad application that has been carefully designed and optimized for the tablet.

According to these people the Facebook iPad application has been in development for almost a year now and is currently in it’s final testing stages.

The question now remains will Facebook’s official iPad application be a hit, seeing as it has to compete with two already popular Facebook applications for the iPad namely MyPad and Friendly for Facebook, the first mimicking the popular Twitter for iPad layout and flow.

It’s evident with the release of the Google plus one button that search is getting social, so now you may ask but how does the plus one button work? To put it simple it works just like the Facebook like button would work, but instead of recommending the item you plus one’d on Facebook, Google will show these recommendation in search results to your friends and contacts.

The Google plus one button is available to everybody to use on their websites from today and embedding it is really simple as well. Simply head over to Google.com/+1button and grab the embedding code, it also comes in an array of different sizes.

For more information check out the Google plus one video

Twitter for long has already sent out email notifications notifying users of new followers and direct message, but with this new feature one can’t help but wonder how many people will actually welcome this new email notification addition.

Although it might sound like it’s convenient to receive email notifications when someone mentions or retweets you, this can become quite spammy for some users, luckily you can opt out to not receive email notifications by clicking unsubscribe on your first email notification. The options to opt out are yet to be added to your Twitter Settings page it seems.

As of yesterday Twitter has rolled out Twitter trends to an additional 70 new cities bringing the total number of location specific trends to 100. Good news for local Twitter users is that South Africa has been added to the list, and even furthermore Johannesburg also, sad that Cape Town did not make the cut as I believe there are more Twitter users in Cape Town than in any other South African city.

To browse trends in South Africa simply click change in the trends sidebar and select South Africa.

Take the Cell C twitter account for example, a quick look at their account reveals that they would rather tweet about how many spider legs there are in chocolate bars rather then about their own products or services.

So what are the main reasons for consumers following brands on Twitter? After some investigation I came up with the following reasons:

• Get updates on future products
• Stay informed about company activities
• Receive discounts and promotions
• Get updates on upcoming sales
• Get free samples, coupons, etc.
• Get access to exclusive content
• To learn about the company
• Share ideas and provide feedback
• Product support

All of the above makes sense to me, seeing as they are all related to the brand itself and that I presume that it’s also what brands are trying to give to consumers through social media.

Why do you follow brands on social media?

Here is a nice infographic put together by Eshaam Rabaney about MXit.

Click to view larger version.