Blog dedicado a la formación en todos sus ámbitos: presencial, online, a distancia
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint is the latest company to pronounce its deep affection for T-Mobile, and is doing the mergers-and-acquisition version of talking to a potential spouse’s parents by making the regulatory rounds before popping the question.
The deal would require the thumbs-up from the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Dept., both of whom ended AT&T’s hopes of living in wedded bliss with T-Mobile (and thereby eliminating a pesky, low-cost competitor from the market).
Part of the reason that T-Mobile is in constant talks for takeover is the fact that parent company Deutsche Telekom really wants to unload it, like a parent whose kid won’t move out unless he/she gets married to someone with more money.
T-Mobile did do a little acquiring of its own in recent months, picking up upstart wireless provider MetroPCS. Similarly, Japanese telecom biggie SoftBank recently invested billions in Sprint, getting 80% control of the company in return.
But would a combination of T-Mobile and Sprint be too big for regulators to approve? With around 53 million combined subscribers, a merger would still leave AT&T and Verizon Wireless as the two largest players in the market with 72 million and 95 million subscribers, respectively.
Some have argued that the only way for either Sprint or T-Mobile to survive in the long run is for them to combine forces, that the only way AT&T and Verizon will take them seriously as a competitor is if they have enough of the market to effect change on their own.
We would contend that T-Mobile, in spite of being the smallest player among the four remaining nationals, has still been able to change the wireless market. Earlier this year, it did away with phone subsidies, breaking out the cost of a new device from the monthly cost of a customer’s data and voice plans.
While none of the others have followed suit so thoroughly, AT&T did recently lower prices on plans for customers who own their own phones, or who are part of the AT&T Next upgrade program. Either way, this is the second-largest wireless provider encouraging customers to pay for their own phones, something we doubt would have happened if T-Mobile hadn’t done it first.
Would a combined T-Mobile and Sprint keep this competitive mindset, or would it be tempted to test the waters and see if its customers are willing to pay the premium prices charged by AT&T and Verizon?
This is all very premature, but it’s the kind of thing you have to think about when you start to consider an America with only three major wireless players.
How many times have you walked into a bank branch and done business with a teller recently? Between using ATMs to make deposits and withdraw cash and getting direct deposit from your workplace, the answer is probably “not all that many.” The bank PNC looks at customers like you and sees the future. A future without traditional teller windows.
Instead of getting in a teller line, PNC customers of the future will walk up to concierge desks. Instead of tellers, they’ll meet with “financial consultants” who can perform transactions like a teller would, but also sell customers new services, advise them, and show them how to use mobile banking so they don’t need to walk into a branch so much in the first place.
“This is being driven by customer choices,” a company spokesman told journalists. The question is, will customers show up in a branch even less with the new format, or seek out a bank where they don’t have to deal with a salesperson every time they want to deposit some rolled coins?
PNC Bank plans to eliminate tellers at many of its branches
Read more:
‘Tis the season — to be terrified, angry or just disapproving of mall Santas everywhere if you’re a kid sitting on some stranger’s lap. Last year we had 24 pretty solid examples of our readers’ kids reacting negatively (for lack of a better word) to Santa Claus, and we’re ready to do it again for 2013.
Here’s what we want: A photo of your kid on Santa’s lap with a look that would make one think that Santa is firmly on that child’s naughty list. No, we don’t want your kids to burst into tears, not ever, but if he or she does it while on Santa’s lap, why not share it with the world?
To send in your photos (the larger the better), here’s how you go about it:
1. Attach it in email with the subject line SCARY SANTA
2. Include your child’s name and age in the body of the email, along with any anecdotes about the experience.
3. Send it to tips@consumerist.com.
Please note, you need to be the child’s parent for your photo submission to be published, or we’ll have to get permission directly from the parents if you’re someone’s uncle or aunt. Gotta prove that stuff.
We’ll round them all up and post them closer to Christmas, so we can really get into the spirit of the holiday. Because no adult in costume is more frightening to kids than Santa — besides clowns. Clowns are just… wrong.
For example! Here’s Teddy (in a nice, big photo size), 11 months, and his dog Bandit — his mom Naomi (a friend of Consumerist) says this is the closest they could get to him smiling. He appears unimpressed.
Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.
It’s unlikely, for example, that the emmental cheese bites and hot dessert waffles (with ice cream, in the United Kingdom) that Burger King is offering for the holiday season will make it stateside. On the European continent, this festival is called “Cheesemas.” In the U.K., it’s “Whopper Wonderland.” No matter where you are, it’s delicious.
I am going to start celebrating Cheesemas right now. Maybe as the day before Festivus.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, Pizza Hut is building pizzas to the skies. Kind of. The Double Decker pizza starts with a regular stuffed-crust pizza, since that’s apparently Pizza Hut’s thing now. Then they top that pizza with another pizza. The top pizza is an exotic one, with Edam cheese, tomatoes, zucchini, and mango-flavored mayonnaise.
As always, we learned about this breaking international fast food news from Brand Eating.
ProPublica has the story of a St. Louis woman who took out a 26-month installment loan of $1,000 back in 2008 from a company called AmeriCash. She was supposed to pay back the loan in payments of around $67/month, and would have paid a total of $1,737 by the time she was done — significantly more than the original value of the loan.
But as happens, she was not able to keep up her payments and went into default on the loan. So AmeriCash brought a lawsuit against her and she signed a consent agreement to pay down the owed debt… plus $2,383 in accrued interest… plus attorney fees. In total, she now owed $4,155. The consent judgement states that she would pay $100/month, but the new interest would only be 9%, rather than the 240% APR she’d originally agreed to.
So we know how $1,000 ballooned to $4,155, but how in the world did that become $40,000?
Apparently, AmeriCash continued to keep charging that 240% interest. The borrower had no idea, as the payments were garnished from her paycheck and Missouri law did not require the lender to provide her with statements of what she owed.
And so even though she was paying down the debt — and has since paid more than $5,300 back to AmeriCash, the interest was continuing to grow and grow over the course of nearly five years. It wasn’t until a reporter pointed out to the borrower that her debt had grown to $40,000 that she learned of her situation.
After ProPublica contacted AmeriCash about the borrower’s case, it decided to tell the court that her debt was now satisfied.
The question is whether the lender had the right to charge the borrower that high interest rate. Missouri law allows lenders to seek that rate when they win a judgement against a borrower, but in this case, the borrower had a consent judgement with only a 9% interest rate.
“I would believe you’re bound by the agreement you made in court,” said one Missouri judge.
Because he can’t compel a lender to lower interest rates on borrowers they sue, he says tries to get lenders to work with sued borrowers to come up with a payment plan that doesn’t leave the borrower in the shackles of debt for the rest of his or her life.
“It’s really an indentured servitude,” explains the judge. “I just don’t see how these people can get out from underneath [these debts].”
ProPublica also tells of another St. Louis who borrowed $100 from a Loan Express store in 2006. When she fell behind on payments, the lender didn’t sue right away. Instead, it waited more than two years to sue, all while the debt was accruing interest. In the end, it received a judgement of $913 on a $100 loan and began garnishing the borrowers’ wages.
Much like the AmeriCash case, Loan Express continued charging high interest even as it was garnishing wages. When she’d paid $3,600 back, she asked the lawyer — who just also happens to represent AmeriCash — if she would ever be done paying off a $100 loan.
“And he said, ‘Maybe, maybe not,’” she recalls. She has since sued, alleging that the lender deliberately delayed filing a lawsuit in order to accrue interest on what had started as a relatively small debt.
The owner of Loan Express tells ProPublica that his company waited to sue because the borrower’s wages were already being garnished by another creditor, and that he gave her multiple opportunities to avoid being sued.
He also said that if the borrower had asked Loan Express to stop garnishing her wages after taking in more than 35 times the amount of the original loan, but added, “legally, I don’t have to.”
Check the entire, fascinating piece on ProPublica.org.
You should know better, Kraft Foods, than to put a job that relates to bacon out there on the Internet and then not have answers for us when we inevitably come knocking. Because while yes, it seems to be a simple customer sales planning job — but it’s for bacon. Just bacon. Nothing else.
A job listing posted by a friend* on Facebook which may or may not be specifically for the Oscar Meyer brand elicited exactly the response one might expect from a bacon lover, which was, “PLEASE TELL ME MORE!”
On the face of it, Customer Sales Planner, Bacon has all the basic requirements listed — education, experience — as well as the responsibilities that come along with it. There’s working with people to do brand strategy stuff, being a sales lead for cross functional whathaveyou, and all the other businessy stuff.
But of course, we had some pressing questions for Kraft. Along the lines of:
1. Does the ideal applicant have to exhibit a proven love of bacon?
2. How much bacon can the candidate expect to come into contact with on a daily basis?
3. Will the worker be required to eat bacon?
4. Are the bacon jobs the most popular in terms of applicants?
And there would’ve been more we could’ve dreamed up to ask, and indeed, noted that we’d love to talk to someone at length about bacon. But after submitting these questions to the Kraft media relations team via their website, there were only crickets, and they weren’t singing songs of bacon. So we emailed directly to make sure the bacon questions hadn’t gotten lost and only received this response:
“Both requests have been received. Thanks.”
Okay, Kraft. The baconbee is firmly in my bonnet. This seems to be a very secretive operation and I will believe that until proven otherwise.
*Thanks to Brendan for finding the bacon!
Maybe there is a particularly accident-prone and practical child out there with a favorite cartoon character. Maybe there are many of them. It’s probably cheaper to buy plain, off-brand bandages, and then cartoon character stickers for your child to plaster on everything, though.
“Talk about desperately trying to capitalize from the holidays, because no, no, no, and no. Bandages DO NOT make good holiday gifts,” writes tipster Kelso. He imagines the scene when children return to school after Christmas break.
“Hey kids, what did you get for Christmas?”
Carrie: I got a bicycle!
Joey: I got a puppy!
Michael: I got a computer tablet!
Annie: I got a box of Band-Aids. big tears well up in her eyes and roll down her cheeks
Mark Rader tells Fast Company that he was a college student at Tulane, interning with a California ad firm 18 years ago. At the time, the firm counted Taco Bell as a client, and the interns were divided into groups to come up with pitches for the fast food chain.
His group made the connection between Taco Bell and PepsiCo — much like the one the beverage company is trying to develop with Buffalo Wild Wings — and created the “DoritoTaco.”
Rader says his group subsequently had conversations with the Bell’s food scientists about the viability of such a product. Could you replicate the Doritos crunch but still have a stable shell? How do you spray on the powder and how does it affect the flavor? How much would it cost?
The fast food chain would eventually figure all these questions out more than a decade later when it actually got around to developing the Doritos Locos Taco, but it was a dead end discussion back in the mid-’90s.
Though his team may have been the first to formally suggest a Doritos/Taco hybrid, Rader says he has no desire to make any money off the invention that has made Taco Bell over a billion dollars.
“I’m sure we signed away all our intellectual property rights, anyway,” he tells Fast Company.
Meanwhile, there are nearly 1,000 signatures on a petition asking Taco Bell to share some of its wealth with the family of the late Todd Mills, who some credit with the creation of the DLT. The company says it has donated $1,000 to help Mills’ family with medical expenses, but the petitioners say that is an insult considering how much money the DLT has made for Taco Bell.
The folks at Taco Bell HQ, however, has maintained that Mills did not invent the product and that his contribution was to get the public to support his cause.
At a Meijer store in Michigan, it appears that where there’s fire, there’s an employee claiming he got fired. A store greeter says he lost his job for leaving his post, which is against the rules, but he only walked away to help a customer put out a van fire in the parking lot.
He says he figured he was doing the right thing last month even though he knew that he was violating company police, reports UpNorthLive.com, but that the customer came first in this situation.
“When the guy came in and said his dashboard was on fire I grabbed the fire extinguisher and I followed him outside and sure enough his dashboard was on fire,” he explained, adding that they were able to put out the fire quickly and he returned to his post.
As quick as that was, he claims he was called into the store director’s office later where he was suspended for his actions, and was fired later that week.
“The one supervisor told me that my heart was in the right place, but my brain wasn’t,” he said.
Meijer didn’t comment on personnel matters, instead simply saying in a statement:
“The safety of our customers and team members is a top priority at Meijer. We have a very specific protocol in place for our team members to follow when emergencies occur and we can’t allow any deviation from the policy that could put our customers or team members at risk.”
For the guy whose truck was on fire, it’s all very confusing, as his truck would’ve been completely burned if the fire had kept going, he said.
“I just think it’s ridiculous why should you be penalized for being a good Samaritan,” he said of the helpful employee. “I thought that was what we were supposed to do, you know you have somebody that is in need, don’t you help them, but I guess not.”
Though this wasn’t the first time the worker was suspended for leaving his post — he chased a shoplifter several years ago — he says he doesn’t understand how you could lose your job over such a thing. He’s currently looking for a new job.
Employee fired after helping put out van fire [UpNorthLive.com]
The SMILA lamps, available in 8 models, were primarily marketed for use in kids’ rooms.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, both incidents involved the children pulling the lamp cord into their cribs.
The recall covers multiple iterations of the SMILA-series wall-mounted lamps, primarily marketed for use in kids’ rooms.
The SMILA STÄRNA is the model in the shape of a blue star. The product’s article numbers are 501.944.49 or 500.108.79.
The SMILA MÅNE is the one with the yellow moon. Its article numbers are 701.944.48 or 700.108.40.
The SMILA BLOMMA looks like a pink or white flower. Its article numbers for the pink flower are 901.944.47 or 000.979.50. The white flower number is 300-746-50.
The SMILA HJÄRTA lamp is a red heart, with article numbers 202.256.59 or 801.993.13.
The SMILA BAGGE is a green bug with article numbers 101.944.46 or 700.728.71.
The SMILA SNÄCKA model is a blue seashell with article number 400-982-50.
The SMILA SJÖHÄST lamp is an orange seahorse with article number 900-982-43.
The article number is printed on the lamp’s packaging.
IKEA and CPSC say consumers should immediately stop using the recalled lamps and contact IKEA for a free repair kit that contains self-adhesive fasteners for attaching the lamp’s cord to the wall as well as safety instructions.
You can contact IKEA toll-free at (888) 966-4532 anytime for more information.
There is a war raging in reviewer land, and it’s one you might not have noticed. BUT IT IS VERY REAL. Or at least it is to anyone taking note of which famous faces are taking the time to review things on Amazon. Because while everyone knows that George Takei is very adroit at making funnies on the Internet, Newt Gingrich is also in the reviewing ring.
Though we know in our brains that there is no actual celebrity reviewing war going on, if there was then Takei would be riding roughshod all over the competition, points out Kottke.org: He’s a top-1000 reviewer at Amazon for his humorous reviews of things like squirrel underpants (that means underpants for squirrels, not featuring them) and inflatable remote control sharks.
Takei is ranked at 584 overall on Amazon for his 25 reviews, with 99% of votes on his reviews getting a “helpful” rating. That’s 99% of the total 129,524 votes his reviews have gotten. And also his birthday is April 20, in case you were wondering.
A sample snippet from a Takei review on unicorn horns for cats, which he strapped onto three alley cats:
Soon things began to happen. Inexplicable things. The neighbor’s dog was found immobilized, trussed-up with some indeterminate golden binding, a warning sign scrawled above him, “Do not crosses the THREE.” A heretofore undiscovered hotspring bubbled up from beneath our yard and now transverses our property. Our clothes began to emerge from the dryer already pressed and folded, and the vet’s office mysteriously called to confirm we had intended to cancel their next appointments. But we had not.
On the other end of the famous people spectrum, Newt “What Should We Call This Internet Phone?” Gingrich has far more reviews, but his ranking is nowhere near Takei’s dazzling achievement. With a reviewer ranking of 416,549 for his 156 total reviews, only 83% of the votes on his reviews were helpful. And only 5,913 people have even voted on his stuff. As for his birthday, it does not say on Amazon.
For comparison’s sake, an excerpt from one of Gingrich’s reviews, this one for The Battle Of The Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864 :
The Wilderness Campaign is particularly worth studying for two reasons. First, it is one of the most complex and frustrating battles ever fought on American soil. Second, it is the first encounter between Grant and Lee.
Enough learning for me for the moment! Back to rodent undergarments!
Maybe that’s the difference, Newt. George is willing to share his birthday in his profile and you are not, which makes him perhaps more approachable. Or he just has funnier stuff to say about not-so-serious things. So if you want unicorn horns for cats, Takei is your man. Important historic battles? Gingrich’s got it.
Like heroin. Or meth, I suppose.
It’s not just you and your friends exchanging stories of That One Time I Spent Three Straight Days Watching An Entire Season Of Breaking Bad To Catch Up Before The Finale. Everyone does it, or at least, about half of the users Netflix studied are binge watching as well.
Netflix announced today that it found the same pattern of binge watching over and over again: About half of the viewers watching stuff on Netflix finished an entire season within one week. That’s up to 22 episodes.
“Our viewing data shows that the majority of streamers would actually prefer to have a whole season of a show available to watch at their own pace,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix in a statement (via the Wall Street Journal).
As if you didn’t already realize it while chatting with friends about how Orange Is The New Black is too good to watch and then turn off, this information shows that maybe bingeing is just how we do things now. Why hold yourself back from the next episode when it’s just waiting for you to click play? It’s not like you’re doing anything else tonight.
Being a show binger is cool now anyway, as viewers called themselves bingers whether they were watching three episodes in a row or 13.
For its bit of research, Netflix said it looked at subscribers who watched “currently popular” shows available on Netflix. That means not just say, Netflix original series like House of Cards, but broadcast and cable series. It’s not saying which ones, but did add that at least one of its own series was included.
But there’s only so much content we can handle — Netflix also found that most of the viewers only vanished completely into one show at a time, instead of several at the same time. A brain can get full, you know. Not that that’s keeping any of us from trying to fill it with tasty, tasty entertainment.
Netflix Says Binge Viewing is No ‘House of Cards’ [The Wall Street Journal]
USA Today has the goods on Pantry, which Amazon has not announced but which looks to be slated for a 2014 launch.
In spite of the fact that Costco and Amazon attract similar customers — people who want low prices, large selection and reasonably decent customer service — shipping has hampered Amazon’s ability to sell these everyday purchases in two ways. First, the cost of shipping these sorts of items is often inordinately high compared to the sale price. If Amazon eats that shipping cost, it may lose money. If it charges shipping costs to the customer, any value goes out the window.
Second, while many Costco and Sam’s Club shoppers have no problem loading up their carts with everything from computers to cream cheese, the idea of buying household staples and having to wait days for these purchases to arrive — or to have them come in separate shipments (not to mention all the cardboard boxes!) — is disconcerting.
While Pantry, which USA Today says will be marketed to Amazon Prime subscribers, can’t do anything about the time delay between ordering and receiving, it does deal with some of the other shipping-related issues.
From the USA Today story:
It will launch with about 2,000 products typically found in the center of grocery stores, such as cleaning supplies, kitchen paper rolls, canned goods like pet food, dry grocery items like cereal and some beverages.
Amazon will let Prime shoppers put as many of these items into a set sized box, up to a specific weight limit. If the products fit and they don’t exceed the maximum weight, Amazon will ship the box for a small fee.
So Amazon cuts down on its shipping costs by grouping as many items as possible into one box, especially if all those boxes are the same size and about the same weight.
The customer will get all his orders at once and without the cardboard apocalypse that would have occurred if items had shipped separately. It certainly won’t be a Costco-killer, but it could give Amazon a bigger slice of the $850 billion/year packaged goods market.
Of course, much remains to be seen about Pantry. Will the prices be comparable to what you get at warehouse clubs? Will Pantry be selling the same super-sized mayonnaise jars and triple packs of ketchup, or will the items for sale be more what you’d find in a typical grocery store? For customers purchasing multiple Pantry boxes at once, we’ll be curious to see if Amazon optimizes boxes so that customers get the most value out of them, or if the e-tailer will arrange items so as to squeeze the most money from the customer.
We won’t know the answers to any of this until Amazon reveals more info (or if anyone at the company wants to tell us at tips@consumerist.com)
See, the current ban on using cellphones in flight is an FCC regulation, put in place more than 20 years ago out of concern about possible interference with wireless networks on the ground. The FCC’s new investigation will determine whether or not advances in technology now allow for cellphone chatter without these interference worries. It’s strictly a technological inquiry: Can it be done?
But the Dept. of Transportation still has the right to issue its own ban on in-flight cellphone use if it determines that such behavior is a safety risk. And yesterday, Transportation Secretary Anthony “Redd” Foxx said his people will be considering it.
“Over the past few weeks, we have heard of concerns raised by airlines, travelers, flight attendants, members of Congress and others who are all troubled over the idea of passengers talking on cell phones in flight – and I am concerned about this possibility as well,” said Foxx in a statement.
The concerns are greater than just having to hear someone in the row behind you prattle on about all the souvenirs they bought while visiting Albany. Some flight attendants and pilots worry that passengers may be distracted and miss important announcements, or that their chatter might distract others from hearing these announcements.
There is also the fact that the mood on a plane can already get pretty tense, with stressed-out travelers and cabin crew occasionally lashing out at each other. Having to deal with some loud-talker who JUST WON’T SHUT UP WHY DON’T YOU isn’t going to make things any more calm.
For the airlines, there is also the negative publicity issue that already plagues planes that are grounded for too long — people calling to complain. We can imagine that some passengers will — justifiably or not — take advantage of the ability to make in-flight calls to file real-time complaints with airline customer service.
In some ways, this is very good as it removes some of the passenger-said/employee-said from disputes, but it may also lead to an increase in petty complaints about lukewarm coffee and boring in-flight movies.
“As the FCC has said before, their sole role on this issue is to examine the technical feasibility of the use of mobile devices in flight. We believe USDOT’s role, as part of our Aviation Consumer Protection Authority, is to determine if allowing these calls is fair to consumers.”
Foxx says DOT will now begin looking into whether or not to ban in-flight calls, which means it’s time for all sorts of hearings and public comment periods and other fun regulatory rigamarole.
Walmart workers claim that the man was well-known for trying to match prices from expired ads, which goes against both the spirit and the letter of Walmart’s price-matching policy. Some employees would let him have the matches anyway, reports ABC 15, the TV station that originally publicized the story based on just an interview with the shopper and not, say, reading the police report.
That alone wasn’t why he was banned from the store, either. He was banned for threatening the physical safety of Walmart employees. “Never once did I say anything to the gentleman,” he had told the TV reporters. According to the police report, the shopper did say a few things to the gentleman. Specifically, “I’m going to mess this mother f_ _ _ker up,” referring to the cashier, threatening to wait in the parking lot to “do [the cashier] in” and to “beat his ass.”
Arizona Man Doesn’t Have Lifetime Ban From Walmart for Price-Matching [New Times]
Man banned from Walmart: Retailer says Joe Cantrell threatened employee
Here are ten of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool this week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.
Our Flickr Pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Want to see your pictures on our site? Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.
Did a mysterious forgetfulness sickness descend upon 221 sickened in Colorado by synthetic marijuana, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes happened? Did part of the population suddenly forget that they live in a state where real marijuana is legal? We don’t know but the CDC is not a fan of the fake stuff, which is illegal in the state.
While it’s not like you can (currently) just walk up to any corner store and say hey, can I get some legal pot please, even if the fake stuff is easier to get, it appears to be sending people to the emergency room quite a bit in Colorado, reports the Associated Press.
That increase in ER visits led the CDC to join with state health officials to uncover a monthlong outbreak of people sickened by fake pot. Investigators found two new kinds in the state, ADBICA and ADB-PINACA, the latter which was also involved in a similar outbreak in Georgia.
Fake marijuana is dried plant material sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids so that it looks kind of like the real stuff, but it’s illegal in Colorado and other states, as well as the federal government, have been trying to ban it. It’s a squirrelly issue though, as the chemical makeup of the stuff can change so often.
Out of those 221 probable cases of fake pot sickening in Colorado, officials looked closer at 127 of those. Everyone who fell ill was from either the Denver area and Colorado Springs, were all about 26 and mostly male. Ten of those patients had to go into intensive care as a result. No deaths have been confirmed.
Again, it’s likely easier to get the fake stuff when you can walk into a store and buy it — well, four that were selling synthetic pot have been shut down, so maybe not — but again, it’s better to be safe, and legal, than sorry.
CDC: 221 sickened by synthetic pot in Colorado [USA Today]
One of the supposed positives of the policy change was that a blocked Twitter follower would no longer see that he/she is blocked from accessing the feed. Twitter says this is to minimize retaliation from crazy people who would retaliate over being blocked from reading a Twitter feed.
Of course, since Twitter was no longer notifying blocked users of their blocked status, those people were able to continue publicly interacting with the feed — responding to Tweets, re-Tweeting items, directing Tweets at the user who had blocked them, all of which would be available to everyone except the blocker. So it was effectively like dealing with a stalker ranting outside your door by turning the volume on your TV up so you can’t hear him anymore.
Then late last night, in the wake of user disappointment on this change, Twitter announced it was reverting back to the old blocking policy, which means blocked users will once again be notified of their jerk status. This will undoubtedly cause some of them to get upset and do things like create new Twitter profiles to continue their insanity (because stalkers are nothing if not persistent).
We think Twitter should give users the option of choosing which form of blocking they prefer, as stalked users probably have a decent idea of how their stalkers might respond to being blocked. If they expect retaliation, then they could go the mute-button route. If they expect the trolls will just eventually stop, then they can go the old-fashioned “You’re blocked” route.
The only true way to lock out a Twitter stalker is to make your feed private, giving access only to followers that you approve. To some, the idea that the entire world would be prevented from enjoying their 140-character quips on everything from politics to reality shows is unacceptable. But keeping those pronouncements public means they will always be inviting haters and possibly worse.
Twitter Reverts Changes To Blocking Functionality After Strong Negative User Feedback [TechCrunch]
