In The Guardian today, there is an interview with Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter. This is the first interview since the company acquired Summize, and it delves into some of the issues which Twitter has had in the past, and the measures they have taken to fix them. Williams is
…confident that the failwhale is going to fade from view. Perhaps not immediately, but given time.
These are reassuring words for the more than 1.5million users who have embraced the Twitter model for their communication, but who are a little tired of that cute little whale being hoisted in the air by some rather strong birds. Indeed, anyone reading The Guardian over their coffee this morning might have felt a warm feeling of relief.
That is, until they logged on…
It appears that a “data inconsistency problem” meant that Twitter had to go into maintenance mode to recover from the fact that most Twitters suddenly discovered that they have lost a good sized portion of their followers as well as a portion of the people they were following. Customer support was alerted to that at about 8.30pm UK time last night. It is now 1.30pm UK time and as far as most people can see, the problem hasn’t been fixed. I am still seeing Tweets and Friendfeed comments like “I seem to have lost 700 followers” and “it really doesn’t look like its getting fixed.”
Twitter, despite its issues, has a loyal following – but for the first time I am hearing discontent among the ranks. Overnight, the activity on identi.ca and Pownce has increased, with users suggesting that this kind of a problem will cause them to leave for alternative microblogging sites. Many people have spent months building up their followers and people they are following, only to find that work vanish.
It raises the question of how far loyalty will go. I can’t see vast numbers of Twitter users abandoning the site immediately, but this issue has encouraged people to consider alternatives. If the tool you are relying on remains unreliable, it is only natural for people to eventually get tired of the problems and shift. Sadly for Twitter, it isn’t the Failwhale which has produced this discontent. It is something deeper than that – it is a damaging of an individual’s own community. This, to me, is far more serious than the constant down time.
However, we will see what happens. As of writing, the problem does not appear to have been repaired. Yes, no-one expects a website to be one hundred percent perfect all of the time. But the internet is a fickle thing. Is it too much to ask for reliability on a free service? Perhaps it is, but if one service can’t offer it, then it won’t take long before another service will.
You can follow me on identi.ca here…
If you like this post, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed. Or you can visit our main website at Tiger Two or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed
