Twitter FAIL Day 3: Communications Breakdown
Quite a few of you saw my post from last night about Twitter's failure. Quite a few of you have noticed that it's still going on. We're about to enter day 3 of Twitter FAIL and still aren't getting a whole lot from Twitter about it.
Yes, Twitter did in fact acknowledge the issue yesterday in the GetSatisfaction forum. But one problem with this is that most Twitter users have no idea there is a GetSatisfaction forum. Would it not be a good idea post about that on the Twitter blog - if not post about the problem itself? Or even better, how about one of those little yellow boxes you now love to use on the main site to alert us to the issue?
And yes, Twitter does have a twitter_status account to update on downtime. The problem? Neither this nor the GetSatisfaction info have been updated for over a day. (Also, is anyone even seeing the twitter_status updates in their stream?...)
The real problem here is that it's not clear there is any problem. It's not like the site is down. It's just not working correctly. You shouldn't just leave a broken site up with no explanation that it's broken.
As The Last Podcast says, talk to us when things go bad. This is a communications breakdown.
PASS: I pointed out something that went wrong with FriendFeed once on FriendFeed - not only did they fix in within minutes, they actually acknowledged my note and told everyone what the issues was.
FAIL: What Twitter is doing.
If this problem spills over into tomorrow - or worse, Tuesday when the huge Web 2.0 Expo starts in San Francisco, expect a world of pain for Twitter. If they would simply acknowledge and update the users it might not be so bad. Otherwise we're going to see Bitchmeme taken to a whole new level.
Follow my updates on Twitter here. Not that you'll see said updates until they, you know, fix Twitter.
21 comments:
FAIL!! Go and see all the latest Tweets from the Twitter team. They all seem far too busy partying in their oh-so annoying west-coast usa style to give a shit.
http://twitter.com/help/aboutus
I wonder if logins to Jaiku are on the up again?
To ONLY post some kind of explanation on a forum I've never heard of, when they have their own communication platform, is quite frankly insulting.
Hah. I just finally weighed in on this one myself on getsatisfaction, so I won't belabor the point unnecessarily. I'm glad you're still talking about it, though, because twitter themselves sure as hell aren't.
BTW, you got some love from CNET: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9923975-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
I thought there might be something wrong with Twitter because the number of posts I see has gone way down.
I used to think @jack, @biz and the rest of the TwitterIdiots hated only me. But now I see that they hate randomly.
Conspiracy Theory: "Is this really random?" I best not start ranting, because I'm sure the people at Obvious and Twitter know people at Google and I'll get blacklisted from Blogger.
You know I'm not allowed in San Francisco, and nobody in SF is allowed to follow me, don't you? Keep up the good fight. Let's put Twitter in a headlock and pin it down to the mat! Then let's remove it's pants and... oops, sorry... I got carried away.
I am glad Techmeme is following your stories !
I would have never known ! Thanks !
Weird coincidence, or conspiracy: I was prompted to save a javascript-related file when I logged onto Twitter this morning. The name of the file: parislemon.json
(more at this link)
Cue spooky music ...
@kosso - i dont know about jaiku (who knows what google is doing with them), but I would bet Pownce logins are up.
i think many agree with you (including me) on the forums
@4fthawaiian - thanks. sometimes having a blog that a fair number of influential read can be very useful.
@robert - and that is the biggest problem IMO, it seems like there is nothing wrong except perhaps your friends.
@gj - if you want a good conspiracy theory, read ian lamonts post (he links to it below in the comments)
@jaffer - you bet
@ian - that is very, very weird. i'll have to follow up on that later. thanks!
Irony: Most of the good business uses of Twitter that I've seen come in the form of customer service (comcstcares, jetblue, etc.), yet Twitter isn't using it for CS. Ouch; that stings a little.
A cynic might think Twitter's trying to pull a fast one: It's easy to make the service appear to be working by simply returning a 200 OK for every Web request. Whether or not the data returned is correct or your queued message ever gets posted/persisted is another story.
@Dan Perry -
The problem with using Twitter for customer service is that if you're having problems with it, you can't contact them.
Sorta like the billboards with literacy information...
This may fix the problem, which apparently has to do with individual caches.
http://twitter.bodyvisual.com/missing/
I am trying to remember when anyone had to pay anything for the use of twitter platform? Obviously they are experiencing insane growth and having their API hit from every conceivable side. Was the last couple days of sketchy service annoying ... does it really matter in the big scheme of things? The oceans are dying and people are starving because we are fueling our taxi rides to Moscone with their petro-food. Lets be supportive - tell the twitter folks how much we are addicted to their service and offer a hand in helping them get things back on track.
@dan - isn't it ironic? don't ya think?
@anon - no idea what is going on on the backend, but perhaps...
@ike - yes, exactly :)
@dwight - thanks for that, i'll check it out.
@opposition radio - all very pertinent to the issue at hand. not sure how we can help twitter resolve cache issues.
Well although it is true that Twitter does not charge for their service I am sure they are counting the days until they either
1. add advertising into the stream
2. sell to Google which would love this kind of service
The payoff is later in the process not earlier in the development.
I am looking forward to Twitter being more stable but I do not think that anyone is trying to hang any mission critical apps off of the Twitter feed so as long as we can be patient this will be a great service in time. I know that i am really excited to watch where it all goes.
Tech Tips
@billy - yes, there's a lot of talk on both points recently. i had predicted last year that yahoo would scoop up twitter (since Google already got Jaiku), but the whole MSFT thing may throw a kink in that, we'll see.
The twitter problems were inconveniently timed. I was trying to promote a new website for a non-profit (http://caring4china.com/) I am working with and my tweets were getting lost.
@luke - unfortunately i think that may have happened to a lot of people.
@kim - i think that is just a coincidence, but you never know...
yawn
Thanks for posting this story. If interested, I featured your story on my blog: http://lowtechtimes.com/2008/04/30/twitter-is-not-only-unnecessary-but-also-unreliable/
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