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.

Step 1) Have great idea. Step 2) ????. Step 3) Profit! Apparently someone didn’t tell Twitter that Step 2 is “don’t fuck it up“. Twitter’s lack of stability and massive downtime lately has been pretty horrid. Rumors that they’ve gotten another 15M in funding are swirling around, but also rumors of technical incompetence there abound. Unlike somewhere such as 37Signals (or betahouse) they don’t have programming rockstars working for them it seems.

Yes, twitter has unique problems. They will require unique solutions. Until someone figures them out however, I think I’m going to back off using/caring about twitter. This is really sad. In the past year I’ve learned to love twitter. Yet, nonstop slowdowns, client bugs, downtime, etc have kinda killed it for me.

Maybe their goal and monetization plan is to get everyone hooked, claim that they can’t keep it up without charging for it, and then get everyone to pay since they are addicted like Crack. I think they’ll hop to Pownce instead. Speaking of, why doesn’t Pownce have similar problems?

Maybe they need to write the program in pure Ruby, or maybe they need to use a “faster” language like Java or C++ to write it. The rails community will surely cry if it comes to this, but it will likely be needed.

But either way, someone wake me up when Twitter has some degree of stability. Until then, I think I’ll just have to be out of the loop.