Until earlier this morning, my twitter account had been ‘broken’ for the past 5 days! This meant I was unable to follow anyone back; which for someone like me, with a reputation for developing communities, is a HUGE problem! Twitter didn’t seem interested though; despite me currently being one of the top 60 most followed people on twitter!
Twitter tech support ignored me
With each passing day, the problem became more frustrating. Over 1000 people had followed me, unaware that I was unable to follow any of them back. I tried everything – I sent emails to twitter’s tech support, I sent ‘tweets’ to the tech support staff, I even contacted twitter’s boss Ev Williams. No one fixed the problem or even responded to me – no tweets, no emails, nothing!
Until….
I managed to find a contact, who knows someone at twitter and was kind enough to email them for me. Then, I sent a tweet out and everything changed – within minutes!
Twitter, Scoble and FriendFeed
My 5 day old problem was fixed within 5 minutes of me sending the message below to the 22,000 people who follow me. It basically says how Robert Scoble suggested I use FriendFeed instead of twitter – along with my FriendFeed user name (which is jimconnolly)
Boom – 5 minutes later my problem was fixed!
What I found frustrating and disappointing, was that it was not until some well-connected people got involved, that anyone listened to me. When they did, this 5 day problem was fixed in minutes.
Amazingly, within literally seconds of the fix, I received my first and only communication from twitter – a tweet that said; “It’s a bug : ( see status blog!” That post has been on the status blog for days and my problem had lasted for days – yet the fix and the only response I got from twitter, both arrived at the same time; 5 minutes after my post!
Twitter and me
I WILL continue to help YOU develop your twitter network; because for 99.9% of users, Twitter is still the amazing service I have always VERY PUBLICLY raved about. I will also continue to tweet, just like before.
However, I shall no longer be promoting my own twitter account via this blog; which is responsible for attracting so many of my followers (twitter associates) – until they invest in better tech support.
Apparently, my rush of new followers is what caused the problem.
Twitter is a wonderful facility!
I know the team at twitter work extremely hard, because I have spoken to people who have visited the offices and interviewed them! That’s why I’m going to stick around. I’m hoping that as the business model develops, some money will be invested in helping twitter’s dedicated, but overloaded tech support team. When it does, the service will be amazing!
However, based on the messages I have received since my problem started, it seems that currently, unless you have high profile contacts, are famous or your problem is very public, like the recent phishing attacks, they just don’t have the resources to respond effectively. There are exceptions to this, but my personal experience and the stack of feedback I’ve received confirms it’s a valid concern.
I can’t wait until the tech support issue is resolved and I can fall back in love with Twitter. This is only a lover’s tiff, not a divorce!
UPDATE
I just heard (10am Sunday 25th January) that Robert Scoble @scobleizer has also got the exact same problem I had; unable to follow people back. I wonder how long it will take before his problem is fixed? Will twitter fix it super fast OR will they make him wait the standard 5 days; just to make a point about how ‘evenly’ they treat all their users?
Thank you Jim for carefully detailing your twitter-crisis experience. I have seen isolated reports, such as @astrospace the other day claiming they lost all 8000 followers and their account was dead, seemingly unable to get assistance from anyone. Hopefully, your openness will allow the Twitter-owners, as well as others who periodically tweet about bugs with their accounts, to find remedies and/or help.
Agreed, Jim. Your experience was indicative of a similar bug that wound me up. The Facebook status update was not working for days. Again, no response. Despite their social networking basis, there was no involvement by anyone connected with Twitter, the status of the application was “green” and no reply to my support request was given.
Twitter need to have a business model and be made acountable. They are enjoying real success at the moment having made the breakthrough into mainstream media and now more than ever they need to prove that they are worth people’s time, which ultimately, is often worth more than a monthly subscription to help the service be supported and scaled effetively.
You know maybe if they had a paid tech support queue or something? I’d certainly be willing to pay a few $$ to have my issue addressed instead of lost in the noise.
You are not alone Jim.
This guy had a problem with his account and no one at twitter responded. So, he actually had to offer a free ipod touch, just to get someone in twitter support to fix it!
Here’s the tweet:
http://twitter.com/zaibatsu/statuses/1103424386
A sure sign things are bad, when you have to offer tech support an expensive ‘gift’ in order to get a problem looked at.
One of the people I was following had a similar problem that has not been resolved to my knowledge. @Astrospace was not as gracious as you are however. If you have time to check out his last few tweets (if the account is still open) you’ll understand what I mean.
Peace
I also had a hard time getting anyone to acknowledge the problem I am having with changing my Twitter background. While not an earth-shattering problem, the fact that no one would respond to me was frustrating. Someone finally did respond, but they have yet to fix the problem. Just because they are the current social media darling doesn’t relieve them of the responsibility of providing decent customer service.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with this. With Twitter’s poor tech communication methods, it feels like one is a little kid in the back of a bus.
I think Twitter could improve by adding those little alert messages to the Web client as they have done in the past. People still don’t know to look for info on the Twitter blog.
Some interesting feedback, thanks.
It seems that there ‘might’ be a business model here, whereby twitter provide the service for free, but charge for tech support and maybe additional functionality.
I would certainly have paid to get my problem fixed sooner.
What about twitter charging everyone with more than a certain number of followers?
I just hope they start to support the service, before people start leaving in bigger numbers.
Well, it IS a free service, and a pretty good one at that. But I agree with Nathan. Twitter needs to quickly find a way to monetize so they can handle the massive growth they’re experiencing.
Christy,
Everyone knows Twitter is free.
Of course, as I have been told many times today, they have already had millions of dollars invested in them!
This is what happens when a service get’s too big and doesn’t make any money.
I can see friendfeed in a few months will be somewhere in a similar place.
You’ve definately been more gratious than @astrospace. This is a prime example (to me) of what happens when you get too big, too fast. Just ask @MrTweet.
Thanks for your article. I’m off to use Friendfeed. I heard Scoble talk about it on the TWIT podcast. I’m not a person with a thousand followers, just a few friends, so my problem of not being able to change my picture will never show up on their radar. Just frustrated that customer support is so bad, since that is what I do for a living. The best way to deal with that is to stop using the service. Friendfeed is the way to go.
Robyn,
I knew about @astrospace having thousands of his followers deleted by twitter.
Never knew about all the trouble @mrtweet had though. Thanks for sharing!
It seems it was only people who gained very large follower numbers, very quickly, who had the problem I experienced. Also, only seems to have hit those of us who follow people back.
It’s unfortunate, but these things will continue to happen until twitter has the proper support staff in place.
The way I look at, if a service is free, then I think a (nominal) service fee for expedited or priority customer service is reasonable.
If I pay for a service (clearly not the case with twitter), then I think there should be no fee for customer support.
JMO.
I guess when you are a little fish you don’t have toworry about overloading problems… LOL
I’m sure twitter and the successful apps are learning by the hour… cool that it’s not a divorce, that would be ugly; I mean who would get the kids I mean twitter followers!
Thanks for explaining, Jim. It’s a shame that sometimes you have to “know somebody” to get your problem taken care of.
so after thinking about it for awhile I’ve decided that things like these situations and problems are the price for ‘free’ services. If there was money riding on it via ads or paid accounts the company would be a lot more motivated to fix issues. Since we don’t pay in cash we have to pay in lower quality service and prolific spam. The problem with Web 2.0 is that everyone feels like we deserve all these services for free, it’s not a very good business model and we’re spoiled by it now.
Twitter has had stability issues as long as I’ve used it.
I suspect they spend most of their time trying to keep the system from falling over completely as more and more people sign up.
Twitter’s simplicity is what makes it so alluring, they are raising money based on a vision where the majority of people communicate using Twitter.
No matter what Twitter says all Twitter users are beta testers helping Twitter to shake out and test their design. Twitter can’t charge either users or advertisers yet because the system isn’t stable enough and I suspect the reason you didn’t get a response from Twitter was because they knew about your problem but were busy working on other larger issues. The response would have been “We know about your problem, but we have other fish to fry first”
Every twitter user has to decide whether they are happy with being beta testers, things aren’t going to change unless and until a credible Twitter replacement comes along and people start moving off Twitter.
I don’t think Friendfeed is it though, it doesn’t have the clean simplicity of Twitter and since Twitter was the first microblogging service to really get some traction Twitter has the critical mass of users and is going to be difficult to unseat. The fact that we all put up with Twitter’s idiosyncrasies shows that Twitter has got the winning combination for now.
Wayne,
An excellent comment, thanks.
I think you are right, that just ‘keeping it together’, is what consumes most of twitter’s tech resources.
I also agree that FriendFeed is more complicated than it needs to be.
Thanks again!
Thanks for sharing your experience Jim. I think it’s important to highlight customer service issues; especially when they help a service resolve its issues in a timely manner.
Interesting!
I just heard that Robert Scoble has now got the exact same problem I had.
I don’t know if this really is a database problem as Twitter say, or if they are making a point, but it’s certainly a concern.
I wonder if they will fix his issue faster than the 5 days it took to fix mine or if they will use this as an example of how ‘evenly’ they look after all their users ?
I will, literally, keep you posted.
“despite me currently being one of the top 60 most followed people on twitter!”
So follower count = importance?
Is this why Scoble and Bill Austin have created separate accts recently? Just curious.
As a newb making some investments in Twitter (my time is WAY more expensive than a subscription fee if there was one), what you share concerns me just a little…
Thx for the nod to FriendFeed.
Brian,
Nope – It just equals ‘reach.’
When I had 30 followers, few people would have known about my problem. By tweeting it to 22,000, it reached a lot more people; many of whom retweeted it.
My listing on Twitterholic.com has already started to drop, since removing my twitter button from the blog and not linking to my twitter account from posts.