David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

In the ultimate act of irony, @biz posted to the Twitter blog a plug/link for the TwitterCounter site, which allows you to track the (general growth) of your twitter following. Hours later of course, people aren’t tracking growth but tracking loss due to Moby Dick, the biggest of all fail whales, eating many people’s followers. Twitter’s response is a Douglas Adams like, “Don’t Panic” button saying:

One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.

Everyone breathed easy for a moment and assumed this to be the case. Those extra 200 or 2,000 followers you had weren’t really followers but just spammers (I didn’t actually know that Twitter was activity pursuing them, which is good to know). If everyone simply lost the “Spam-follower” inflation, whatever. That’s fine. Readjust and move on. Stop claiming that you have 15,000 followers when they are all spammers.

So what everyone did then was check a follower or two of theirs. There was a fast realization that the guy in the office next to you, who certainly wasn’t a spammer with his paltry one update a day, was no longer following you and vice versa. It wasn’t just spammers. It wasn’t just the “count being off”. Something was fucked.

Twitter hadn’t updated the status blog, but @EV (one of the founders of twitter) did tweet, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t just the *count*. But the important thing is: It’s being fixed right now. And we know what happened. Do not panic!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m still panicing. This isn’t good. This isn’t stable. This makes the Middle East look stable. My followers dropped by over 200, many of them people that I know well. What if Facebook just stopped you from being friends with a huge portion of your friends? What if they removed the linking to your girlfriend and made you ’single’? (For some I know this could likely cause them to actually be single due to the silly politics around Facebook relationship status).

So check out the TwitterCounter. Mine shows buckets of fail. Checking some other friends shows oceanloads of fail. We all said EPIC FAILZ before, but now we know the true meaning of it.

What do you make at your job? I actually don’t care, but you should perhaps realize that it’s worth less today than it was yesterday. Surely that’s only a few pennies you say? Let’s figure that out.

In the US, we work an average of 1777 hours per year. Let’s say you’re making $30,000 a year, a fairly average amount for someone in the US. So you’re at 16.88 or so per hour for ~222 days a year (8 hr days). Our average inflation is 3% a year on average. Sometimes this is higher. For example, thus for in 2008 we’ve seen right around 4% inflation if not higher. Some items increase far more in cost, such as oil and health care costs. The consumer price index can show us this. For simplicity’s sake let’s choose 3%, as I don’t think anyone will say that the number is too high on average.

Very simply put, you’ll have to have 30,900 in wages after a year to equal 30,000 of the prior year. So you got a raise to 32,000 maybe? Only really 1,100 of that was a ‘raise’ on your abilities, extra work, experience, etc.

Let’s say you didn’t get the raise however. That $900 difference in purchasing power is huge. You work 222 days a year. That is $4.05 less daily that you can purchase that you work. That latte in your hand? Tomorrow you’ve made that much less in purchasing power. That’s something you can tangibly see.

If you make a bit more, its really startling if you aren’t getting your yearly raises as you should. Make 100K? That’s $67.50 less per week in purchasing power. That nice dinner you were going to have? Forget about it now.

So what’s my point? My point is this, if you aren’t getting raises (which in today’s economy you likely aren’t) you are getting kicked in the balls. It’s not just that you are making the same money, you’re making less money.

My suggestion for responsible employeers is this: offer continous cost of living increase raises. If you pay 24 times a year, increase each paycheck by 0.125%. Then your “raises” that you make yearly can be based on merit, not on economic inflation and stress. When I worked at State Street, I actually put this as a small quote on my monitor, “You are worth $4.05 to your employeer than yesterday”. They didn’t like that much.