Dreaming Of Beetles

Update: Seems that TrueTwit has brought out their “premium” paid model where you aren’t forced to TT your potential followers. Sounds more like blackmail than a service.

Update 2: How are you supposed to validate if the fraking site is down? Screenshot at very bottom. FAIL.

There are many great services popping up in the Twitter ecosphere, but there is one that I fail to understand. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I could just ignore it, but it is forced upon me. There is also a viral mechanism in play that is causing this dreadful service to propagate and I can barely stand it anymore. I left a comment on their blog and sent a message to their Twitter account about this negative viral impact. The blog comment was deleted within 24 hours. The service I speak of is TrueTwit (no link for you!).

This is what the service does:

Stop wasting time with spammers on twitter. We will validate your followers so you don’t have to.

Use Case
A bit of head scratching later, I realized this service is catered to those that auto-follow. If you didn’t, you could weed out the spammers/bots yourself.

Flaws In This Model

• Auto-Followers are most likely to be spammers/bots themselves.
• Putting up barriers for followers is only going to turn people off.
• If you don’t auto-follow, what difference does it make that a spammer is following you?

Negative Virality
This is where things really start to suck. According to the site, you can bypass all this CAPTCHA nonsense if you sign up with the service. What isn’t apparent is that when you sign up, you become one of them, now making your potential followers jump through hoops. And on it goes.

Much anecdotal evidence points to these facts:

1. Using the service will greatly decrease your followers
2. People aren’t always aware that they have been assimilated

I’ve attempted to discuss these problems with the service, but they are unwilling. I could be wrong about all this and this service could be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don’t see the light.

Please post a comment on your thoughts of this service. I’m very interested in what you have to say.

Follow clatko on Twitter.

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Update: An interesting thing I noticed about the suspension process is that Twitter literally unfollows ALL your friends. And when you are reinstated, they refollow ALL your friends. I would think there would be some kind of suspended flag somewhere to avoid taxing the server like this, but that isn’t how they roll. With having just followed 93,000 people in a single day, you can imagine how many DMs I got (19k and climbing).

For reasons unknown, Twitter has suspended my main account, @clatko. I have submitted support tickets but have the feeling those are going straight to /dev/null. I’m so lost without my account, I’ve gone and done the most faux paus thing possible, appealed to the Twitter developer list. I don’t expect a response on there until Monday as usually Twitter devs don’t work on weekends.

Come Monday, I’m going to raise the storm of storms to get my account reactivated. I have a pretty strong battle plan and may need to call on my facebook friends and friendfeed subscribers. I’m not going out without a fight.

Oh, look. My account is back. Somebody somewhere must like me.

Thank you!

image infekted.it

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Follow Like Crazy

Update: I have confirmed that Twitter is using MySQL (unless the mentioned upgrades are a move to a different DB).

With all due respect, Michael Jackson may have given Twitter the final knockout punch. I’m sure you guys are sick of hearing of Twitter’s problems, and frankly I’m sick of writing about them. This new failure is worse than any failwhale, this is a failure of concurrency. Here is a brief timeline of what has happened so far:

1. June 3 – Twitter realizes there is a half-hour lag on follow/unfollow that should be resolved WITHIN THE NEXT HOUR OR SO.
2. June 18 – Twitter states it is making infrastructure upgrades to fix the follow/unfollow delay OVER THE NEXT 24 HOURS.
3. June 23 – Twitter again states there is a lag on follow/unfollow and offers additional info on areas affected – device notification changes and favoriting, BUT WE ALREADY KNEW THIS.
4. June 23 – Twitter announces additional upgrades for the 24th to fix the problem and says the problem will persist UNTIL LATER IN THE DAY TOMORROW.
5. June 24 – Twitter says the upgrades were successful and that the catch up period will last FOR AT LEAST ANOTHER 6-12 HOURS.
6. June 25, 11:26 am – A Twitter employee states “We’re still working on the fix and this is currently the top priority of the services team. It’s a pretty extensive code deployment so it is taking some time.”
7. June 26 – I’m following fewer people today than I was yesterday and my 1,000 FOLLOWING/DAY LIMIT HAS BEEN HIT.

I can’t talk about the Twitter infrastructure, but I’ve seen this problem before in one of my own companies. With MySQL replication across multiple servers and tons of activity going on, it is almost impossible for the slaves to catch up. In addition, each replicator is generating enormous log files in the event replication fails. These log files can quickly fill up a server especially if you don’t know what you’re doing and have MySQL in a tiny /var partition. Once the log file overruns the server, you cease to replicate until the situation is rectified. I suspect this is what the problem is and with each addition of servers (in the above-mentioned upgrades), those log files get nastier and nastier. There is a fix for this replication problem, but it involves taking all systems offline, rsynching from a master (if there is one) and clearing all logs.

Now MJ steps into the picture and blows the infrastructure away. The search sidebar was removed and later re-added, but this just keeps the failwhale at bay and does nothing but compound the follow/unfollow delays. Now we’re at critical mass with this problem as follow/unfollow basically does not work, or works inconsistently at best. This is going to turn people off in droves as the system is not working as expected. The “I just don’t get it” of Twitter has just been amplified. The image on the above-right show a single person that REALLY wants to follow me, each mail highlighted in blue says “This person has just followed you,” sad thing is, after all this effort they still aren’t following me.

With the failwhale, people got upset but realized that there is so much cool stuff going on here I can hang tight until the system is back. It is sort of like the logic behind the beta-invite. This is entirely different, Twitter isn’t acting as expected.

Also, I’m only taking about one aspect of Twitter in this post. There are the search problems which still aren’t fixed despite the update provided in that link. There was the “all posts coming from the web” problem which occurred over a weekend where, apparently, they take a holiday. This may not sound like a big deal, but it was for a lot of developers and even one business had to SHUT DOWN until the problem was fixed. There are many, many other issues that I’m just not going to bring up.

I’m not giving up on Twitter, but you can find me on FriendFeed.

To Twitter’s credit they have been fairly open on their status blog and their employees are pretty active on the mailing lists.

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Spatter, Speet, Spitter, Spam!

Looks like the reCAPTCHA got jacked (or more likely the Mechanical Turk got involved) and the floodgates have opened for the spitters (or whatever you wanna call them). The account shown on the right gained several hundred followers in the time I watched it. Page after page after page of these useless, non-profile-imaged, non-bio’d, non-locationed, never-status-updated freaks.

Back to watching Scotty Got An Office Job or earning another banjo on Hunch. No wait, I’m extremely busy with a crazy deadline. Scratch that.

Off topic: I updated the Intel-Optimized Firefox build. It seems there is an official RC2 that slipped out after the announcement of the RC availability. I’ve built the RC2 version and you can download on the download page.

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Update: After almost a week of testing out this “| ” @ reply concept, I heard from a large group of my followers that this is NOT what they want. The consensus seems to be that individual users want to be able to make their own choice as to if they see these replies or not. Makes sense.

Apologies for being slow on the draw, but this is insane. I didn’t really realize what was going on because I was always on the inside looking in – I was in the “power user” 3%, but following some 40k or so people meant that I always saw some @replies flying around. I thought people were taking this update a little too seriously and kind of brushed it off.

Also, going in, I thought the “show all @ replies” meant that I would see BOTH sides of the conversation (which was incorrect). This further clouded my vision on what was going on, plus there were a few blogs that told the wrong story – I guess I was confused. ReadWriteWeb, like always, has a great analysis of this which I did read, but I should have paid more attention.

I thought, well Twitter should just flip the switch to make the default “show all @ replies” for everyone – take the 3% route instead of the 97% route. This would show everyone BOTH sides of the conversation (which is not correct) and everyone would be happy. But if everyone saw both sides of the conversation, people could inject spam into the million follower club and all hell would break loose! (This is when I realized the BOTH sides thing was totally incorrect, which lead me to shoot up in bed and come down here to write this post).

I logged into my test account and looked at my regular account stream, only to find that it was BORING AS HELL! I have a ton of conversation using my regular account and that is what puts context around my tweets. I tweet some lame stuff sometimes and people ask me about it so I do my best to follow up with those users, not realizing no one else is seeing these tweets.

Twitter waffled on the decision a bit and made a totally lame argument for why this was being done (lame technical and lame UX arguments), made a lame attempt to remedy the situation in the short term, and made a lame promise for the future:

Second, we’ve started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we’re already working on it.

This future “per-user setting” invalidates their previous technical argument (and the UX argument). What is going on?

From here on out, please prepend all @ replies with a pipe “| ” so we aren’t forced to live in Twitter’s fantasy land. This doesn’t seem to work on all platforms, just make sure your post is not “in reply to”.

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