It’s raining app features this week. Twitter’s saying sayonara to online trolls, Pinterest gets even cleverer and Facebook adds weatherman to its résumé.
Ta-ta, Trolls!
Beware of the internet trolls: they’re everywhere. With a lot of spare time on their hands, they manage to lurk around all forms of social networking websites like slimy parasites, ready to post inflammatory remarks at the click of a button. In fact ‘trolling’ has become such a modern phenomenon, it even has it’s own Wiki page…
But, in an attempt to battle this online harassment, Twitter is delivering not one, but three new anti-troll tools. In a recently published blog, the site announced that its new features will be rolling out in the near future, the most practical one being a filter that hides “abusive or low-quality” tweets by default. See you never, trolls!
And that’s not it – Twitter is also hunkering down on its hoard of online bullies by limiting new account creation. Its algorithms will be able to identity people who have been permanently banned from the site, and will ban them from creating new accounts.
Twitter should have probably thought about implementing these changes a long, long time ago…but better late than never, right?
All *Hail* Facebook
Continuing on its thundering path to world domination, Facebook has introduced yet another new feature. The social media service is giving all users the ability to check their local weather forecast anytime, anywhere. But wait, aren’t there phone apps that already do that?
Not the first time Facebook has stolen ideas and sold it as its own, the newest feature began rolling out on Wednesday, on both desktop and mobile.
The weather feature will default to a users current location, but simply tap the ‘Settings’ button at the top of the page to add a new location (i.e. that tropical getaway you booked to get over the January Blues).
Pinterest Lens
If a picture is worth a thousand words, Pinterest is a gold mine.
Hot on the heels of its last update, the photo sharing website has plans to launch yet another spanking new feature – this time, a ‘Visual Discovery’ tool. Using artificial intelligence, Pinterest Lens allows its community to “use the camera in the app to discover ideas inspired by objects you see out in the real world”.
How it works? Users can open the Lens function, snap a picture of whatever catches their eye – like a pair of shoes that you need in your life, or maybe a swanky chair that would look really good in that home office of yours – and immediately see a plethora of related images before them.
It’s just like magic (and some very clever technology).
