ParisLemon » If Twitter Breaks in the Woods and No One Can Tweet About It, Is It Really Broken?

If Twitter Breaks in the Woods and No One Can Tweet About It, Is It Really Broken?

I noticed a few people thinking the same thing as me today: is everyone taking a break from Twitter? People do get burnt out from the web after all and it was a pretty nice weekend day in a lot of cities. But no, Twitter is broken. People are updating and most of the updates are simply not coming through.

Click on some of your friends’ profiles. You’ll see they have updates, yet those updates are probably not in your Twitter stream. But some are, making things even more confusing, and making it harder for people to tell that Twitter is broken.

We’re all used to Twitter outages, but this is something different. Something behind the scenes is misfiring, but only just enough so that not everyone realizes. On top of that, I have this weird feeling that some people are tweeting less because they think no one else is. Twitter might be like a yawn in that regard – when you see someone else do it, you do it. If you don’t, you might not.

I’m not sure if someone else has already noticed this, because I can’t see if you Twittered it unless I go to your actual profile page. I did tweet about it as well, but since you probably can’t see it, I’m writing it here.

Twitter broken. Needs fixing. Help!

Post by MG Siegler on 04/20/08
Comments

louisgray

The solution is to unfollow somebody and then refollow them. It "refreshes" your thread and catches you up.

From 5 hours ago:

http://twitter.com/louisgray/statuses/792776491

MG Siegler

Interesting, thanks Louis. As much as I would love to sit here and un-follow then re-follow 450+ people, I will instead wait for Twitter to acknowledge and fix the issue.

They best hope this doesn't spill over into Web 2.0 Expo or there are going to be quite a few unhappy campers.

Badaboom

I thought it was me. Usuallyy when I post a pic to Twitter it gets about 300 or 400 clicks (Flickr tracks these things). Yesterday afternoon I posted a pic entitled US Smog and Gas, the name of a gas station in Berkeley, and it only got about 50 reads. I found this depressing until I read your posts, now I feel better (not much). On Friday I posted a link to my Amazon wishlist page, and on Saturday it was gone. Having your communication backbone get all lossy is not a good thing. Dave Winer

Mark Evans

The fact that Twitter may be broken is healthy for the already overloaded Twitter Nation.

Go outside, enjoy the sunshine and warmth, particularly in the northeast part of the hemisphere where we've had neither sunshine or warmth since, well, last September.

mdy

If you visit @twitter_status, you'll see that Twitter DID acknowledge the issue some hours ago.

They also acknowledged it in the Twitter Support Forum that's hosted by GetSatisfaction.com.

4fthawaiian

@bodyvisual has posted a fix, which seems to have helped the problem for me, if not completely alleviated it:

http://twitter.bodyvisual.com/missing/

Tony Hung

Or -- you could just use FriendFeed. It was suprisingly snappy and responsive and in some respects a better Twitterer than Twitter.

Greg Schwartz

When I saw you first question, I thought you were headed a different direction with this post. 'Cause I am indeed taking a break: http://openstacks.net/os/2008/04/19/making-a-tw...

Scabr

@Mark Evans It's impossible.Twitter is new heroin!

Ben

I wonder if, ultimately, the best solution might be a more decentralised network. Twitter are doing very well, they're very nice people and I enjoy using the service, but if it's got any chance of being the communications engine a lot of people want it to be, it's got to be more of a ubiquitous communication technology, like email, than a closed network like Facebook. It would be infinitely scalable, and they could still make plenty of profit from it.

Jazza

removing, and re-adding people works temporarily, but then fails again :(

thattalldude

I have been noticing a significant slow down in my stream. However, lets pretend Twitter isn't broken, and people truly are just taking some time away. This is a win for everybody. Twitter wins because of less stress on their servers. People tweeting win because there are less people to overshadow their tweets. Readers win because they're more likely to connect with the people they follow that tend to get buried throughout the week. And people not Tweeting win because it simply isn't healthy to spend ALL of our time on Twitter, getting away helps us to enjoy it more when we're there.

MG Siegler

@badaboom - yeah just imagine if people for some reason started using twitter for things critical to their businesses/lives, something like this would be a disaster.

@mark - something tells me that instead most people sat around hitting refresh on Twitter :)

@mdy - cool thanks. when bloggers write up stuff like this, it tends to get a lot of play, so hopefully its encourages twitter to find a resolution even more quickly :)

MG Siegler

@4fthawaiian - thanks. so that's the 'unfollow' 'refollow' thing right? i've gotten various emails from people that even that only works temporarily.

@tony - i was! how do you think I knew for sure twitter was misfiring...that was much easier then clicking on all 400+ friends

@greg - good luck with that. i have a feeling you'll be back :)

@ben - interesting idea.

MG Siegler

@jazza - thanks for that update, you're not the only person i've heard that from.

@thattalldude - i hear ya. keep dreaming :)

Arul Prasad

"Twitter might be like a yawn in that regard - when you see someone else do it, you do it. If you don't, you might not."

- Can't stop LoL-ing on that one.But its so true!

MG Siegler

@arul - thanks. I thought quite a few people would be with me on that one.

Cory

I am just now learning of Twitter's existence and contemplating if/why I should use it...and then I read this! I wonder how the Amish community is taking this crushing blow to the internet...

4fthawaiian

@MG Siegler - yup, that's the link to the automated version written by @bodyvisual, who is my new hero.

It does only work temporarily, but it's very useful for the "sit down and catch up on tweets" thing that a lot of us do when we're taking a break from coding, etc.

john

Definitely check @twitter_status or http://status.twitter.com. Of course, if you want third-party verification, there's always http://www.istwitterbroken.com, too.

manifest

Nice post