Stay N' Alive - Latest Comments in Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

afallison — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:42:36 -0000

Twitter is awesome. I love the way disqus blogs integrate it so well. ;)

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

No Thankyou — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:30:53 -0000

I'm not defending Twitter - I'm playing the devil's advocate. I don't see where people get off criticizing something they are getting for free.

"As a business trying to make money off this stuff I have every right to demand that Twitter remain reliable."

No. You don't. If you paid for access to the Twitter API, then yes, you would have a voice. But you don't. You pretty much mooch off of the hard work the Twitter folks do to keep the service up and running for everyone and then expect them to bend over backwards for you. Twitter has no "responsibility" to you simply because you've chosen to leach off their service.

Now, is it a bad thing Twitter deleted these tables? You bet it is. All I'm trying to get across is that mistakes happen. Provided Twitter fixes the problem in a timely manner (15 minutes to 12 hours seems timely to me), then I'm OK with that. If Twitter refused to acknowledge the problem, or in any other way tried to deflect responsibility for causing the problem I wouldn't be taking this stance. But from what you've posted, it sounds as if they have been pretty darned open about it.

Furthermore, put yourself in Twitter's shoes. From what I'm seeing, you are not running any kind of service that's comparable in size to what Twitter is. Things change A LOT when things get big. Things happen that you simply cannot anticipate and I suspect this is one of those.

Lastly - I choose to be anonymous because this is the internet, afterall. I am simply not comfortable providing any real information about myself in a public space. I don't go about in public spewing my private information, and I don't do it on the internet, either. Simple as that.

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

jessestay — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:45:50 -0000

Oh, I'm not mooching - I would pay for access to the API if they'd let me.
I wish they would so I could hold them more responsible. Until then I can
only blog about it.

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

jessestay — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:05:33 -0000

"No Thankyou", I'm always amazed at the length people are willing to go
through to defend Twitter, despite all its problems - and I'm curious why
you're trying to remain anonymous here. As a business trying to make money
off this stuff I have every right to demand that Twitter remain reliable.
When Twitter goes down like in this instance, so does my business. I don't
care if their code has bugs in it - so long as they're going to be allowing
access to an API like this they have a responsibility to protect data and
ensure the service is reliable.
Bugs or no bugs, DBAs "accidentally" deleting entire tables in a database is
inexcusable. At every reputable place I've worked at you can lose your job
over mistakes like that. One time would be one thing, but twice (and I
argue this isn't even the second time this has happened - I remember it
happening several times before) shows you have a problem with your DBAs.
Something needs to be fixed, and I have every right as a business user of
Twitter to demand that. Deleting tables in the database seems to be a very
common occurrence at Twitter - it's inexcusable.

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

jessestay — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:57:57 -0000

Unfortunately that won't fix this problem since this is related to
whitelisted developers and not really followers. It's the same concept
though - a DBA at Twitter accidentally deleting data from their database.

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

No Thankyou — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:27:30 -0000

So let me get this straight. You're expecting someone's software to be completely bug free? As a software developer, I am sure you can understand the difficulty of this, especially in something as complex as Twitter is. Sure, they deleted a table in the users database earlier this year. It happens. They recovered the lost data and haven't had that happen since. Now they've deleted a table from their whitelisting database. Whose to say these two problems were caused by the exact same problem? Conversely, whose to say these were caused by two separate and distinct issues. From my POV, I see it as the latter. We're talking about two separate databases, likely running separate code from each other. Could Twitter have done better? Sure. But holding them to a higher standard just isn't fair to them. We're all human (and some of us software developers). We've all done stupid things we wish we could take back. The bigger issue would be if Twitter were to have the same mistakes over and over again. I just don't see this happen. I see mistakes, but then they are addressed and don't reappear at a later date.

Re: Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

NikkiPilkington — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:32:31 -0000

You can of course back up your followers at http://www.tweetake.com