What’s up at Twitter?

So I awake this morning to find that my merry band of followers has disappeared, that’s problem one, problem two is that the people I follow have also gone missing! what a perfect start to the summer holidays. I mostly work from my office at home - well garage conversion actually - and now that the summer holidays have started the noise level of kids playing has gone through the roof! that’s problem number three.

This post however, and my frustration this morning is squarely aimed at Twitter . How on earth do you loose so much information? if Twitter has a currency it has just dropped through the floor. Over the last few days they have been hemorrhaging data at a staggering rate, lost Tweets, Followers and Followees. Why do we put up with it? is Twitter so useful that we will put up with all of the downtime, lost information and generally poor service. Is this the future of Social Media? Does the fact that sites such as Twitter are free make us less inclined to complain or move our service elsewhere.

This is what the folks at Tweet Central have to say about the downtime: http://status.twitter.com/post/43329900/updated-follower-following-counts - note it was 7 hours ago.  7Hours!!! how long does it take???

Why can’t we make a backup of our own data, the tweet conversations we have had, the people we are following etc. On days like this I want to be able to take my profile and seamlessly move it over to indenti.ca for example. Portability of our own information is a hot topic. I want to own my data (within social media) and have the ability to move it around as I see fit. How easy is it for example to delete ones Social Media profile on sites such as Twitter , then again Twitter HQ is so bad at keeping our data they may well delete my account anyway!.

I am beginning to question the viability of Twitter as a useful tool, in theory it’s fantastic but in practice it is somewhat different. Anyway, rant over, Twitter has officially taken up 2 hours of my time this morning, I wonder how many people end up in anger management classes to deal specifically with social media frustration…. perhaps I should set up a group but it wont be on Twitter that’s for sure.

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