The case of Twitter's missing followers
In an update on the issue on Twitter's status blog, the company said that they are working on restoring the correct follower/following counts. They go on to say that, "Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously...The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date...when we remove spammers from the system (which we've been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time." Even though it's great that Twitter is trying to sort through its problems with spammers, decreasing someone's number of followers is going to cause some backlash if it is not communicated properly. The removal of followers, due to spam, may have even gone unnoticed if it wasn't for this larger issue highlighting it.
(Credit: TwitterCounter.com)Sarah Perez, at ReadWriteWeb, speculates that the problems arose due to a malfunction of the "Twitter anti-spam bot." As you can see in the image above, I lost 13 percent of my Twitter followers in one fell swoop. Other users have reported a drop in followers still as high as 28 percent, although it appears that the problems are being fixed even as we speak.
Even if Twitter is able to fix this problem, it is clear that confidence in the company is shaken. The ever-enthusiastic Louis Gray chimed in, saying, "Every time I think they've captured the market on a single route to failure, they find another way." There is no doubt that Twitter's service is a crowd favorite and everyone is dying to see them succeed and break into the mainstream, but they just keep shooting themselves in the foot with incidents like this. Individually, these sort of problems are tolerable, but when they are all lumped together, like they have been with Twitter, people are not going to stand for it. If Twitter fails, it's not going to be because of other sites like FriendFeed. It's going to be because of themselves.
Update
We just received an update on the situation from Biz Stone, over at Twitter. He writes, "Some users lost followers as a result of an error during a database upgrade. We replaced followers last night and will be replacing followers today. This is not related to the spam initiative we blogged about the other day." At least Twitter is hard at work trying to remedy the situation.
Twitter should be castigated for not communicating in a clear, ongoing and timely fashion. They haven't said what the problem is, they haven't indicated whether they think they've resolved it, when they might reach that point, etc.
If Twitter's goal is to achieve immortality by being a business school case study in how *not* to do PR and how to infuriate your loyal customers, they're doing a great job. I've always thought I'd be one of the last to leave; I'm giving it serious thought.
I'll follow you Harrison to help you get your numbers back up.
I'll follow you Harrison to help you get your numbers back up.
But today when I logged on I had 0 followers and 0 people I am following.....I hope they come back!!
Funny, right after the Twitter downtime....sounds like Twitter needs some stronger engineers....
First a couple of days ago, Twitter pegged me as a spammer even though I had a 5:4 ratio and over 2K people were following me (neither of which should cause alarm) and they stopped me from being able to follow more people. I requested help four times, and their response was a cold and unreasonable one: Unfollow people in order to be able to follow people again. I explained the ridiculousness of this answer and received no further response. There was no way to appeal my spammer status.
Then, came the follower crash - I have lost over 800 followers with no idea where to start to get them back. Having 2,000 followers was flattering and hard earned and I at least would expect a better and more public explanation of what is going on - in fact, their reaction to both the spammer issue and the follower issues appears to be irritation that we would dare question them.
When the Fail Whale first came out, I said it was like that book Charly ? you cant give us something, make us dependent on it, then take it away. But Twitter is no longer the only game in town, and this time I think its possible that they?ve jumped the whale and people will start to defect out of frustration.
For example, there are tweets that are appearing in twitter that were NOT sent by the user.
See more example here --> http://friendfeed.com/e/ba089e01-c963-4bcb-af4e-229362ff8b8c/Twitter-sending-unathorized-tweets-via-my-account/
Louis Gray also had the same thing happen to him today as well! http://friendfeed.com/e/c771a4f7-b311-22e6-c21a-58ef542a6c42/benboeser-that-s-true-but-Internet-needs-to-be/
Twitter has lost destroyed my trust in their product as they've clearly lost data integrity in their application and seem terribly unable to manage the swift recovery of it. Worse yet, they've inform people that they've "fixed" the problem...no they haven't! twitter's database is corrupted!
Susan Beebe
@smbeebe
For example, there are tweets that are appearing in twitter that were NOT sent by the user.
See more example here --> http://friendfeed.com/e/ba089e01-c963-4bcb-af4e-229362ff8b8c/Twitter-sending-unathorized-tweets-via-my-account/
Louis Gray also had the same thing happen to him today as well! http://friendfeed.com/e/c771a4f7-b311-22e6-c21a-58ef542a6c42/benboeser-that-s-true-but-Internet-needs-to-be/
Twitter has lost destroyed my trust in their product as they've clearly lost data integrity in their application and seem terribly unable to manage the swift recovery of it. Worse yet, they've inform people that they've "fixed" the problem...no they haven't! twitter's database is corrupted!
EPIC FAIL WHALE...augh!
Susan Beebe
@smbeebe