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.

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.