The problem: It looks like when Twitter went down today, when it came back up it lost a bunch of follower/following connections.
Liquidsunshine said:
Aaagh! Twitter knocked off 50 of my followers and about 30 of my "following". Wtf!
And Alex Iskold said:
My followers and following are down. First is understandable, second has to be exact. Lets revisit tomorrow.
Of course I should be able to say something about my own numbers, but while I *think* my numbers are down, I did not have my following/follower counts committed to memory so I can't be sure. But no matter, it appears something is up.
I suspect Twitter has backups, and that they will fix this, but for people who really rely on Twitter (for either emotional or serious business purposes) if so much connection data really is lost, it would be a nightmare. A sufficient amount has been written about the problems keeping Twitter up and running, and so I will not revisit them here. But it does highlight the issue of how important this kind of data is for so many people. And without a reasonable way to back up such data, it does call into question the reasonableness of relying on web based services for critical business purposes. The idea of losing contact with people and not having any reasonable way of reconstructing those relationships is certainly frightening.
If this is not solved some time later today, I think there are going to be some very unhappy campers in Twitterville. Hopefully this is only temporary.
update: it appears they are already working on fixing this as they indicated on the corporate blog, though at this hour (1am est) they are clearly not totally back to normal. Thanks to Morriss Partee for the latest info.
update 2: at 6:46am the problems still have not been fixed. This suggests that the message from yesterday saying they had fixed the problem and were propagating the data is now either inaccurate, or they rolled back to an old data set. If so, this really may indeed be Twitter Armageddon.
It's not as bad as it seems. Most, if not all of the "loss" may have been deleted spambot accounts. Twitter has a link to this message on its home page about the issue:
ReplyDeletehttp://status.twitter.com/post/43329900/updated-follower-following-counts
-Morriss Partee
It's actually much worse than it seems, not less so. Over the last few weeks, while on paternity leave, I had the chance to hit up Twitter Karma several times, and synch my followers/following. Yesterday, I was following almost 1,600. Today, I'm now following 672.
ReplyDeleteThey must have rolled back to an earlier version of the database, the last stable one. But this is ugly. What happens if you follow new people now, while it's not synched?
Gawd, why is anyone on twitter at all? Am I the only person in the world that sees that thing as a pointless and lame complete waste of time?
ReplyDeleteThis points to a much bigger problem than Twitter (Stanley Mibaum take note). Many people have created valuable social networks (for personal and business use) on various popular social sites. This could very well happen on Facebook, Friendfeed, Plurk, etc. (of course, it's much less likely on those platforms). We would have no recourse and our connections that we've spent a lot of time building up would just... vanish (buried deep within said social site's database possibly never to be recovered).
ReplyDeleteWhat is your recourse? Who owns your social connections on line which is akin to (and in some ways even more valuable than) your personal physical address book? I have some pretty strong thoughts on this (and maybe a solution). And, of course, these questions have been raised and debated endlessly on tech blogs already. But enough of that for now.
We'll see if Twitter fixes the problem (as they say they are currently trying to do at getsatisfaction.com)
can I recommend this video to anyone who think twitter going down is a nightmare
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwGzdbLweUI
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ReplyDeleteFUD. Plus, who cares? Twitter's relevancy continues to decrease, and noise levels, increase, with the recent round of automated spam accounts and mass followers with disproportionate ratios.
ReplyDeleteI was expecting some kind of rebuttal to this when I typed in your URL today:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.1938media.com/salaam-e-baloney-black-website-review/
If you don't mind me asking, is it coming tomorrow, or do you think you'll just be ignoring it?
Jon,
ReplyDeleteIt's funny. I have gotten a boat load of emails of people asking what I am going to do and telling me how much of an a-hole they think he is. I don't know. He didn't hurt my feelings or anything so I am not really sure what (if any) response is warranted.
I have to agree it was pretty funny, they went to a lot of trouble, the puppet design was really well done. I saw some comedy thing on that site a few years ago but I had forgotten about it.
ReplyDelete