Question: The Facebook app on my iPhone isn't showing the right profile pictures for friends when I pull up my News Feed.
Paul Sakuma, AP
Facebook developers deal with one of the most complex databases in the world. Inevitably, there are a few glitches.
Answer: When my wife showed this to me on her iPhone 4, I thought it might be an isolated issue. I shouldn't have wondered — when hundreds of millions of people regularly use a site, there are few singular glitches.
I was reminded of that after I asked on Twitter if other people had run into this problem and quickly got 15 responses along the lines of "yes, all the time." Their reports didn't suggest much of a pattern, however; some saw pals' photos replaced by those for other friends, while others saw those pictures swapped out for profile images of pages they'd liked.
Further confirmation came from Facebook Monday evening, courtesy of an e-mail from spokesman Derick Mains: "This is a bug in the iOS app. We've fixed it and it's included as part of an update that's been submitted to Apple for approval."
"The photos that get mixed up are ones the user has previously seen (another's friend's photo or a liked page, etc)," he said, adding that the product managers involved thought that less than 1% of Facebook photos were affected.
(Friday evening, Mains wrote to say that this 4.1.1 update was on its way to the App Store, but it had not shown up on my wife's iPhone by mid-afternoon Saturday.)
But I also heard from a few users who said they saw the same mixup when browsing Facebook in Google's Chrome browser. Mains said his colleagues had not seen any evidence of that.
Thinking about it, I'm amazed that we haven't witnessed more more glitches like this at Facebook. With more than 845 million monthly active users as of December, the Menlo Park, Calif., social network has to maintain one of the largest, most complex databases in the world — one that hackers and spammers constantly try to exploit, and one that Facebook itself keeps revising every time it updates its features.
The weakest link in Facebook remains its users, who often click on suspect links that get their accounts hijacked. But if you someday see not one but a large batch of your friends appearing under the wrong photos or posting the wrong messages, maybe the worst has happened at Facebook. In that case, try e-mailing or calling those friends to see what's really up with them. If they're close enough, stop by their homes to say hi.
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Tip of the week: Make sure your computer can recover from a hard-disk crash
Most computers include a hidden or semi-hidden recovery partition, on which the manufacturer has stashed a backup copy of the operating system and other critical files. Should things go sideways with part of the drive, you can summon help from this segment of it with the right keystrokes as it boots up.
But if the entire hard drive goes sideways, the recovery partition could also be out of reach —as a reader reminded me during a recent web chat.
To avoid having to wait for your computer's vendor to send you a new set of discs in the mail, possibly at extra cost, take advantage of the software most provide to create a backup recovery tool.
In Windows — for example, Dell and HP's sites offer guidance on this — you usually run a designated application to copy the contents of the recovery partition to a set of CDs or DVDs or a USB flash drive. You'll have to check the computer's documentation to figure out which program will do this.
On a Mac, Apple's Lion operating system allows for a remote startup and restoration of your system software from Apple's servers. But if you installed Lion on some older models, you will need to install Apple's Lion Internet Recovery software update to enable this option.
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Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based in Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.
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