DISQUS

Mka · 1 year ago

Dude! What do you want them to do?

1. You want a great service to begin with. They had a great idea and coded it using Rails. And it wasn't scalable for millions of messages every day.
2. You don't want any downtime. If you shut them down and let them build a new app from scratch it they would probably get it scalable so the whole planet could twitter.
3. You want it fast. With every app and every stupid little thing on your computer the way to get it fast is to cache the hell out of it. Caching always means data redundancy. This is the way scalable architectures are built. And they are building it while hundrets of thousands of people use it in ways they couldnt possibly have imagined even months ago.
4. You want it free and still want to rant about how they suck.

Just give them a break!

andymurd · 1 year ago

Agreed. Follower counts are nice but I can live with a few bugs there.

The interaction supported by Twitter is the key and they have really improved reliability in that respect. Thanks for your comment Mka, I was wondering if I am the only person that really wants Twitter to succeed.

leigh · 1 year ago

Someone else gave them 20 million dollars. Are you saying they can't afford to build a proper architecture that won't fail every other day for 20 million dollars? I would suggest taking that kind of money and expecting that people won't be pissed and/or leave the service if it keeps going down is an unrealistic expectation.

keif · 1 year ago

So you are saying that with 20 million dollars you can?

leigh · 1 year ago

With humblest respect, I don't think your question is relevant. Whether I can or not is besides the point.

The point is, that once you leave your alpha and beta stage and are taking big money hoping to be bought for big money than customers expectations change. That's just a fact. It's like the expectations of a child vs. an adult. Once you become an adult, you can't just turn the clock back when it's convenient. Either they are a real business or they aren't. I would suggest once you have 20 million dollars involved, you've graduated to being a real business and with that comes real customer expectation. Like it or not. Fair or not.

keif · 1 year ago

No, I think it is relevant - a company being handed x amount of dollars doesn't guarantee anything other than the idea is solid enough for investment.

I remember awhile back there was talk of leaving Rails to go to PHP (or some other 'expandable' solution - I know, this isn't a "ruby is/is not scalable conversation) - they chose to stay with Ruby - so maybe they though they could continue with it. Maybe with the money they should have rebuilt it from scratch.

Whether or not you consider them a "real business" - that's a matter of opinion. According to the TOS that EVERY user agreed to - twitter has no responsibilities to anyone, for anything. If they shut down tomorrow, all its users can't exactly do anything except move on.

Point is - all this "twittering" about how much "twitter sucks" is getting really old from a bunch of people who use a free service (especially when there are quite a few alternatives). Unless you're one of the people who dropped the money - but really they're the ones that have the right to "complain" about their investment.

Good lord, how's that for a comment? ;) Don't take any of this personal, please, I speak to be corrected and become better informed! :)

leigh · 1 year ago

Again, I don't agree about your comment about the "right" to complain. Regardless of free, if it's broken all the time then free means I'm paying too much. I pay with my time, my frustration, my wasted efforts etc. All start ups should get a break as they ramp up, get better resources and real money. However, if they get 20 million bucks and STILL can't fix the issues, that means to me that the problem simply might be unfixable and therefore the product will become useless and we as users will look elsewhere. I believe that on the Web products often become co-owned with their customers so regardless of what their user agreements might say, the power of the network will prove the lawyers and the business folks wrong every time (think Facebook Beacon or Myspace widget ad policy).

As for taking things personally, respectful disagreement is one of the reasons i love the web. No offense ever taken. :)

keif · 1 year ago

Respectful disagreement? This is a rare commodity! :)

If it's free, and broken - I say move on. Those that stick out can deal with, and if it's really worth it, you can always come back later when it's fixed (assuming they do get to that point before everyone leaves).

I'm with you on "co-owning" the brand - however Facebook/Myspace are money making entities - ads, selling of data - twitter (AFAIK) doesn't have this (but the data is pretty open).

Really, if a "twitter killer" came along (maybe it has?) it hasn't been able to really do any better, yet. Until one comes along that can handle twitters numbers and data handling, I think twitter is probably going to be the best option.

Having said that, they're dealing with TEXT. Flickr tosses milions (billions?) of photos/images - how many times have they gone down? Like this old post from flickr in '07:
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2007/05/29/were-going...

They announced downtime and gave some stats about how many *billion* bits a second they do - on twitter they say 11,000 requests per second (per this blog[http://www.mooseyard.com/Jens/2007/04/twitter-rails-hammers-and-11000-nails-per-second/] - take with grain of salt) and it also states AOL handles a billion IMs a day - so is twitter doing that much more, or could it possibly be that everyone that said "Ruby doesn't scale" or "Twitter needs a rewrite" is right?

Unfortunately, I can't find any "real data" about twitter's data usage/needs. Maybe they need to quit creating "custom feeds" for Zappos et. al. Maybe they need to go down for one month to rebuild, and to show everyone how much they need twitter (because I see TOO many "twitter is down" messages to indicate people do not care!)

adondai · 1 year ago

Yeah, I agree with that one! Seriously I'm getting a little tired of everyone acting like the world is crashing down because a free non-essential service has a little downtime.

David Speiser · 1 year ago

I couldn't agree more. Every time I want to rely on the service ( and I do love Twitter) it seems to choke on me when I need it most. Thanks for the analytics, it's nice to get some insight once in a while.

Duncan Riley · 1 year ago

You shouldn't believe them now, or the other 500 times the service has failed. We are edging that much closer to the day where the bulk of Twitter's user base says enough is enough. Any other service would be dead by now, it's a testament to Twitter's user base that they keep sticking by it.

micahwittman · 1 year ago

The Fail Whale was greeted, in general, as the embarrassing uncle who crashes the party for a bit then leaves. Fine, laugh it off. VERSUS: You step outside for a minute, come back in and everyone is gone, a creaking door is swinging in the wind and no one knows what really happened - there's a different kind of visceral reaction to that.

seancarmody · 1 year ago

I agree that this issue was different in its significance to the fail whale. Twitter is not (yet) an essential service, so unavailability (even regularly) is annoying but not disastrous. The problem here with losing followers is that those affected most were those who had invested the most time in twitter. The sense that much of the effort taken to find and follow (and be followed) was very distressing to many people. No surprise that identi.ca and others experienced yet another numbers boost!

nick halstead · 1 year ago

But what is the alternative? do they do a netscape and rebuild and die, they have to incremental the changes and in doing so they are going to do massive damage to reputation as it continues to be flakey, I have been in development for 15 years and the most painful thing to do is rebuild something that was wrongly architected in the first place...

sent from: fav.or.it

Kim Woodbridge · 1 year ago

I save all my emails - everything. So I searched through Twitter follows and have found that I am not being followed by anyone who added me between 7/6-7/21. So, it isn't just inaccurate numbers or spammers - these are people I want to connect with. For example, I lost andymurd below and Louis who started following me a couple of days ago. It's really frustrating.

And I think Louis' twitter post about twitter reinstating an old database is true - that is the only way that my check on emails and followers makes sense. I'm just hoping that as I re-follow people that they follow me back again.

Like andymurd, I've been easygoing about the problems with twitter but this last mistake really has me upset. How can you build a community when Twitter takes it away from you? And what kind of back-up system do they have? I would be really surprised if this gets fixed without me re-following the people that I lost.

andymurd · 1 year ago

I guarantee that I didn't unfollow you Kim.

Oh, but you're just showing off with "Oooh, Louis Gray follows me, la la la". Louis, follow Kim again! Do I have to start a petition?

Kim Woodbridge · 1 year ago

I know you didn't :-) It's so frustrating because it seems like I lost my favorite followers and not the possible pseudo spammers. And, hey, I was pretty excited when Louis followed me back the other day and poof - now he's gone again :-) I am not hopeful about Twitter fixing this ...

Hey, and stop picking on me ;-)

Svetlana Gladkova · 1 year ago

What I find the most frustrating about the situation is that there is now almost no reasons for people to stick to Twitter. We've heard voices from people explaining why they don't leave Twitter giving the main reason as having their community over there and not willing to build it elsewhere. Right now there is no such reason because you can not rely on Twitter to keep your community where it is - and that could really lead to a mass exodus after all.

micahwittman · 1 year ago

I agree with you. But, reality is complicated: 1) People taking action on a purely rational basis *doesn't* happen, 2) Cognitive strain of leaving your native microblogging community square _can_ be over come, but is painful and 3) Some, especially the casual users _and_ the heavily-invested users, are like motorists murmuring about pot-holes in the road, but living with it because that route is the shortest from A to B, while thinking: - "I'll do nothing and 'THEY' will fix it some day."

Let's just hope the community makes an informed decision.

Svetlana Gladkova · 1 year ago

Correct, it is hard to expect rational decisions when the community seems to be deeply in love with Twitter no matter how much it fails. I'd really prefer to have a stable Twitter to moving somewhere else - I just hate changes almost in all areas. But many users seem to be too angry with Twitter so we should not expect informed decisions from them - love and hate tend to blind people.

philbaumann · 1 year ago

When Twitter posted video of new offices, I thought that was ominous. I expected just more typical whale fails, but I didn't expect them to be so creative and inventive in their approach to failure.

It's a real shame, because I think Twitter is a useful tool in the right hands. Perhaps it's time for the right hands to run Twitter. Still, something irrational tells me Twitter's wings will continue to flip and flop.

Maybe Twitter just needs to burn completely, arise from the ashes and rename itself Phoenix. But that mantle might belong to identi.ca.

Eden · 1 year ago

Of course my numbers are much lower than yours, but I only noticed a small drop in my followers (like 6-10), which could definitely have been the removal spammers. On the other hand, I didn't check the list so it also could have been my closest friends who are no longer there- I better go look!

NaS · 1 year ago

so, not just me and everyone then... practically affecting every tweeters eh?

Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago

Aren't the numbers fixed now?

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

The Twitter numbers are not even close to fixed. I went up one to 673. Still missing between 900 and 1000.

nickhalstead · 1 year ago

Ouch, I seem to have lost about 20% - so its not consistent how many people have lost...

sent from: fav.or.it

Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago

actually, mine seems like it's almost back to normal. weird

nickhalstead · 1 year ago

nope, still very much broken.

sent from: fav.or.it

Roger Jennings · 1 year ago

My Following and Followers counts went to 0. Had to rebuild Following from the People avatars, which (for reasons unknown) didn't disappear.

--rj

kamla bhatt · 1 year ago

I am one of the lost folks from Twitter's database...and unable to log into Twitter.

What is the secret of Twitter's continued success among its user base?

Kamla

Svetlana Gladkova · 1 year ago

Louis, I have just found that both our posts (thanks for the link, BTW) have been linked from a post that reached the front page on the largest Russian technology community site (it is somewhat similar to Newsvine in implementation but geeks only and VERY popular) at http://habrahabr.ru/blog/microblogging/47687.html so it may be interesting to see how many visitors they can send (in light of the recent discussion of blog links sending less traffic). Profy has received 5 so far :) And they describe us as almost hysterical about loss of our precious followers :(

keif · 1 year ago

I'm not really being convinced by your arguments that a free service is letting you down.

I see post after post of you condemning twitter (and pointing out how great the competition is). I don't have all the numbers, but have any of the other microblogging/twitter clones have the same numbers as twitter? Do you not think when they blow up (possibly ahead of schedule) they'll not have the same issues of growing too quickly?

People can bitch all they want about a free service (god I love the internet), but really - it's a free service. No ads. No spam (unless you auto follow). No reports (that I'm aware of) of someone's account being hacked into and spamming.

So the problem is downtime. Game networks have downtime. Sites have downtime. Maybe it's time Twitter scheduled a daily/weekly/monthly "we're going down to put in improvements." But I have a feeling a large number of users would cry that they can't use twitter for five minutes.

So all the "twitter power users" want their cake, and want to eat it to.