Twitter finally unbanned me!

August 1st, 2008 Comments

@Tibbon is back in action. After about ~5 hours of things being really odd (ie. banned from Twitter) and much bitching and complaining my account is all set. In the end it seems that myself @pfanderson, @davedelaney,  @conniecrosby and @pknit were deleted/banned. I’d really like to thank everyone for helping me out and trying to get the attention of the management at Twitter. As a very cool aftereffect of this, while I’m still following everyone (I see their updates), it shows that I’m following zero people. That’s the ultimate ratio! lol

I’d like to thanks everyone that noticed and helped complain (err, I mean use social media) to help:

I’m still curious as to what happened. The Status blog tells nothing. Companies should perhaps take this as a small lesson. If you’re twittering about watching a movie and having beer, and customer service complaints are racking up on twitter about your service… then things start to look bad. Your illusion of being ‘busy’ gets broken. I totally realize that all people and all companies deserve chill time, but just keep an eye on the customer service too.

  • Share/Bookmark

Twitter lets out the mother of all Fail Whales

July 23rd, 2008 Comments

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing entries tagged with wtf at David Fisher : What is Noise Blog.