I’ve been noticing a bunch of issues with the microblogging service du jour lately:
- apparently, it likes to randomly unfollow people for me
- then, when I try to re-add / follow them, the API tells me that I’m not allowed to follow them as I’ve hit a following limit. Only, I can’t have done, as I can follow other people.
- even after “rebalancing” my ratio – now over 1100 followers, which is pretty amazing – it doesn’t let me add that one individual, but I can add others.
I’m not the only one reporting weirdness – one colleague actually “vanished” earlier today, his page and account were not reachable / findable, only to reappear later. Other people have mentioned that they have also encountered the phantom unfollow bug.
Although the fail whale is deployed a lot less often, which is welcome, there do seem to be other signs of instability. Not bad for a free service, but given how central it is becoming and how widely-known it now is, it’s frustrating.
Update: ticket opened.
Yep – vanishing people is bad. I’ve had random unfollowing too. But it also:
* Still has a really sucky web interface, without even the most basic of conversational threading, inconsistent handling of replies, DMs, etc.
* Has an SMS gateway of questionable reliablity (many texts don’t get through).
* Doesn’t show many posts on the homepage at all.
As someone who has yet to be persuaded of the merits of microblogging, it’s not a great advertisement. Sadly, Metcalfe’s law means that pretty much every other microblogging platform would be pointless to join.
I’m seriously considering giving up on Twitter.