Few users seem to have noticed this, but apparently Twitter is no longer appending the correct application that was used to update user streams at the end of each message. Everything is marked as coming “from web”, even if the message was actually sent out from a desktop client, third-party web or mobile application.
Here’s the kicker: after some digging, I found that the company has learned about this issue a couple of days ago but decided not to fix it in order not to disturb the engineers during the weekend:
“With all the recent increase in Twitter API developers and ease of registering an OAuth application, we’re seeing a large growth in the source parameter database. The logic that appends source parameters to updates caches all of the source names in one large object. This object recently surpassed 1MB which is interesting because it is the largest size of an object that fits in memcached. The lack of ability to cache this object was causing an enormous hit on the database degrading performance.
The quick solution was to disable source parameters so that engineers didn’t need to give up their weekend. This will be fixed as soon as possible, likely early in June 1 workday.”
Guess they’re having a long weekend.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering how this will affect the ranking of ‘most popular Twitter clients’ and the likes.
(Hat tip to Chris Cosentino)
LOL …. It is very useful for me
LOL … just another post about Twitter. How many readers who think this post is really useful … raise your hands … LOL
When will you get back to profiling companies like this:
http://www.tech...ch.com/2005/06/
weekends are important.
*Raises hand*
But then I wouldn’t have opened the article in the first place if I didn’t believe I’d be interested. I guess I’m just… logical.
It didn’t take me long to read, I read other blogs too so I moved on.
I’m not inconvenienced with every little post that doesn’t directly excite/intrigue me.
Windowslogy, get a job. I’d rather hear about MG’s twittering undies than seeing your ultra boring comments on every post.
It would have been nice to say this without the ‘i saw it first nernernernerner neerrrr’…
…but from robin its nice just to get an article without spelling and grammatical errors.
I do your best.
+1
Nice to see that Twitter cares about its employees so much. If I put things like that off for clients they wouldn’t be clients for very long!
Are you paying Twitter a fee for service?
I laugh when people say “but it’s a free service so don’t complain”. Gina, Twitter would not exist without it’s users providing content. So YES, we ARE paying for it with our time and content contribution.
what are you talking about rob? Its not exactly an issue thats going to cause any degradation of service.
Its interesting, and why should engineers give up their weekend for something that is.. well.. minor at best.
They also don’t like to give up their nights. Running upgrades in the middle of the afternoon is unacceptable. Imagine Salesforce coming down at 3pm on a Tuesday for an hour to do some upgrades so “We can have all hands on deck’
Yeah, but um, the internet is Worldwide. And as I understand it, EVERY HOUR IN THE DAY is afternoon somewhere!
as soon as Robin sends in her support check to Twitter, they might be willing to address this minutia.
When you reach this size and if you are a global company then guess what? You need multiple data centers worldwide so you never go down.
I suspect the vast majority of users are US based. Take it down at midnight PST.
Robin isn’t sending in “her” support check because “she” is saving up to shave off “her” goatee.
http://www.crun...n/robin-wauters
BTW, this article is one big “who fucking cares?” The only people that care are the ones who measure their e-penis size by how many twats they get from a particular app.
It’s just those clients using OAUTH, and the “most popular”clients do not use that.
Seriously, stop it with the Twitter posts.
Nope.
Not sure if you are joking, but your readers have been requesting you to stop this twitter nonsense for a while now. Twitter is great. We get it. TC is now starting to appear arrogant.
I used to exclusively read TC for my web 2.0 fix. In the past few weeks I have started reading readwriteweb as well. I’m sure many of your users will start migrating too. I like you guys and want you to listen to your users and thus be successful.
-TC well wisher
The poor content is beyond annoying. Hold that door for me.
Twitter again? WTF? Watch Tonight Show with Conan O’Brein (Tue episode) – I laughed so hard when they had a segment about how lame and moronic twitter is. Seriously TC, put a cork on it already.
As a basic service, this has no bearing on how people use it. It might screw up stats for a week on what third party client is most popular, but you know what, it’s _nice_ that twitter even shows you what you’re posting from… It’s definitely not an integral part of the service, and at best, slightly informative of user habits.
This error prevents no one from using the service, including those that may be reporting incorrectly. Why should engineers have to come in on a saturday to fix something that affects absolutely no one in the usage of the site? Presumably stats can be remedied, or at the least, excluded from whatever rankings people use for this period of time.
I feel like TechCrunch has less news lately, andmore inane editorials (RSS is dead) or misinterpretations of events (iPhone redownloading = AT&T is evil). I guess it’s time to trim down my feeds. later!
Wow. You guys need to get out more. Seriously.
“Someone at Twitter farted!! OMG! Quick, get a post up at TC!”
heh
Yeah, it’s about to the point where they would actually post a story every time someone at Twitter dropped a bomb.
I am Mr Dotzler’s therapist. As you can see he is making excellent progress! Thank you for helping him.
it’s interesting to see the problems of the first rails app to become so big and popular. makes for a good case study of problems (and mistakes) to avoid for rails developers who hope to be big or are on their way to becoming big i guess.
i would say this isn’t newsworthy and not worth posting about, but then why am i awake at 4:40am responding in the comments of the article.
this isn’t such a big deal that people need to be bothered during their weekend to do an emergency debug/fix though. despite the social media culture’s obsession with identifying growing pains, twitter management still needs to prioritize and run their operation like a business, with consideration for employee sanity.
I guess it’s the middle of the night in California, I shouldn’t expect any TC posts to be interesting.
It’s unclear by this information whether source names are being lost permanently, or just not being rendered correctly.
This isn’t a TC worthy post. Jesus.
There was a thread on friendfeed last night about the ratio of awesome posts versus boring pointless ones like this one. 1:5 or 1:10 was the popular suggestion.
Was there also a thread about the ratio of sensible comments versus trolling?
Was there also a poll about the ratio of Tech Crunch writers who respond to trolls?
I think Twitter’s going to quickly realize that we can all live without them if they keep this up.
Really? You would quit using twitter because of this?
Pointless TC article, zero newsworthy content, a waste of ad impressions. The TC ratio of quality vs crap continues.
Don’t worry guys, we’ll refund you … oh wait, it’s free content
Yes but you expect a high standard because its TechCrunch. You are the top tech blog afterall.
“Yes but you expect a high standard because its TechCrunch”
Let me guess, you are new around here huh?
From a busines side its awesome the data is hidden which app is making the data post.
Competitor advantage in a growing niche is sometimes a good thing EH
rabble rabble!
Yup, people have been bitching about the decline of quality since 2005, about a month after Michael started the site. Strangely, just about everything else appears to have increased, including the number of trolls.
Maybe we could restrict the troll’s food supply a little? *cough* Robin *cough*
I notice this 2 days ago and look on my OAuth code to see if the problem was in our side. Then I check other apps that use OAuth and the problem was on Twitter side. I wonder what will happen on Twitpocalypse day. http://www.twitpocalypse.com/
So, not just because I’m the “hat tip” here – but this is a legitimate issue. The major reason for the success of the multitude of twitter clients out there is their ability to be “discovered” in posts from those we follow.
Tools like Tweetdeck and twhirl would not be nearly as popular were it not for massive numbers of users seeing a plug for them every time someone they follow posted a tweet from one of these apps. These apps then in turn have powered more and more users onto Twitter. We all know if we were stuck to just using the web or SMS many of us would probably not use Twitter at all.
Going days without this info is keeping such free advertising from these app developers, a scenario where no one wins. And Twitter’s decision to just shut it down until they could get around to fixing it seems to yet again echo their lack of understanding of the implication of such decision-making.
Get over yourself. Any developer called in over the weekend to fix such a lame issue would be hella pissed and probably quit. Twitter made the right call.
Wow I thought Robin Wauters was a cute girl. Thank goodness I didn’t go to far with my thoughts
Yes, thank goodness for both of us
He’s not?!
(Just kidding Robin)
WTF. What kind of company doesn’t prepare for this kind of stuff?
Keep the Twitter posts coming. Us developers are interested.
I like it when companies don’t disturb their employees on their days off for non-blocking problems.
Can some one explain to me what the supposed problem is with the Twitter posts? This is a technology news site. There has been a lot of Twitter news around the web lately. What is wrong with posting it?
If you notice a post is about Twitter, and you aren’t interested in Twitter, then why not just skip over it. Its not that hard, is it?
Twitter is the hottest internet company at the moment, I use twitter many times a day and love it. But even I get sick of all the stories on TC about it. There’s really only so much interesting to say about twitter on a daily basis, but TC posts about 5x as many stories as that. This is a perfect example of that. Maybe 0.0000001% of twitters care. The rest could give a fuck.
When this blog withers away in a year or two (if posts like this continue) don’t fret, you guys can always find a job doing some QA. It really is your calling.
Companies need to choose carefully when they should bother the developers on the weekend. Twitter made the right choice. People should only have their weekends disturbed for real emergencies, otherwise you’re just crying wolf and causing burnout (let alone resentment).
EXACTLY!
There are real emergencies, and there are hangnails — annoying, but the world won’t end. This sounds like a hangnail.
No kidding. If I was called in to fix this “problem” on a weekend, I would be super pissed. It’s a complete non-story but TC does have a quota of at least 10 Twitter stories per day so I guess they’re just trying to meete it.
I am suprised that Twitter does not have weekend support / admin / dev staff there, for situations like this.
haha, thank you very much !
Just spent an hour on our new OAuth upgrade and trying to work out why it wasnt working with the source append!
That calls for the afternoon off and heading down the pub, cheers twitter
(& techcrunch of course)
>Meanwhile, I’m wondering how this will affect
>the ranking of ‘most popular Twitter clients’
> and the likes.
guys, how is it possible to search/filter on this field? In twitter search there’s no such parameter
Re "few users seemed to notice" and tips of the hat, Louis Gray blogged about it on Sunday http://www.loui...e-of-third.html and it was discussed in the comments on MG’s weekend thread about the search engine downtime.
twitter is the next myspace!
Mark – this story is valid. I wrote about it on Sunday, and the reason it’s a valid story is because it impacts developers, as I wrote last night in the story about TweetStats, which referenced the same forum Robin linked to.
YAWN!
Who cares? Is it really such a big deal that we need a front page TC story about it?
Actually, to all those who’re mad about this post…
1. I wasn’t even aware there was an issue until I saw it. Tweetie doesn’t show “from web” or anything else on tweets.
2. I was able to point a friend here when she asked why all the tweets say “from web.”
I don’t usually take the time to post on TC but I am really sick of hearing about twitter. Yes, an amazing phenom, can’t argue with that, but this is just another tool for mega-narcissists to say “hey, look at me! I’m doing something mundane and boring and I know you all really want to know about it because I’m so f’ing interesting!”
the dominance of twitter is they can do all this bitch slapping of everyone developers, users and due to them have no competition in the space they can get away with it. it pays to be the first mover
who would blame them to let their programmers have a kind of weekend? it doesn’t affect the usabilty, rather a few unimportant statistics and the marketing of 3rd party apps that make free use of twitter (while some of them are even commercial).
Here’s some more details, and the real problem we’re facing here:
http://staynali...esponse-system/
Do you people really believe that tech crunch writes this stuff for free, they’re getting PR payments from twitter to write this crap day in day out. I made a membership yesterday to check out the black version of twitter & i couldn’t see the point of using such a stupid utility, maybe i’m not seeing the difference of using myspace & facebook which are far more visually appealing and user friendly, much better formatted pages etc etc etc
How many people here have NEVER used Twitter or signed up but never ended up using it?
Are you a Facebooker or do you shy away from that too?
I myself use neither and find spurious comments/forums posts to be the bulk of what I do in an internet social context.
I only see a value in maybe following a group/committee/process “user” on Twitter but haven’t been pushed to that point yet.
Harry “Why am I even posting this?” Wang
Yes, stats will be skewed for two days. Certainly not the end of the world.
Sure, I had to “shut down” TweetStats briefly so I don’t get too much tainted data. But really … the loss of the source parameter is certainly a very low-priority issue. Particularly with other site stability problems that have been cropping up.
By the way, having suppressed the source attributes here, Twitter is protecting their developers from being discovered by the Chinese government
Good on Twitter for reminding users that it’s not an issue of life and death (and for letting their engineers live life).
It’s just more high-tech social networking, the stuff that keeps us from having to have a real conversation with a real person…
Is there a way to filter the twitter posts out?
^ @ mass- get rid of twitters server & all will be fixed
http://search.twitter.com/ i have tried to find this link in twitter home page and profile page. But it is not in there. It should be there. What do you think?