What Is Noise

Sometimes the only way to express yourself is via a facepalm. This evening Twitter really fucked up hard, and rocked even the most hardcore Twitter users to the core.

Twitter works on a system of following people and being followed in lieu of ‘friends’. This is the way that your voice is heard, and the way you heard others. Without it, its pretty stupid and basically just a system to update your blog via SMS (like I said, stupid).

This evening some problem popped up that basically cut many people’s followers down by 20-80%. One of my friends went from 500+ followers, to just over 100.

Twitter acknowledged the problem and said they were fixing it. The problem seems to have occurred when they ‘fixed’ it however they made things worse for some. I wasn’t affected in the first round, having over 600 followers… and now I’m sitting in the 400s after many others seem to have their problems fixed.

This has many questioning whether Twitter is useful, or worth their time. Seemingly no amount of money that is thrown at the problem will fix it before the usebase outscales it. Everyone wants their site to go viral right? Well twitter went viral and the virus is killing it.

Twitter said that it is just in the ‘count’ and that it didn’t actually affect user followers. I disagree. I KNOW that I was following @samhouston for example. Yet when I looked at him this evening, I wasn’t. That’s simply not good. Its unfollowed people. Does Twitter keep backups? At all?

Where would people go? Pownce? Brightkite? A twitter clone written properly?  Can social media people still justify putting time into Twitter if its going to inject a bucket of fail whale nonstop? Moby Dick seems to have been let out of his cage.

This hurts my head and I’m ranting, but its late and this freaking sucks. No more fail whales please? kthxbai.