[twitter-dev] Re: Disappearing / Reappearing Social Graph & Lists
I'm seeing this in spades through last night and all morning long so far. Seems to happen more with certain accounts. Randy
[twitter-dev] Re: Very slow response with API from Slicehost
I have been seeing enormous numbers of 502's and 500's for API calls from Qwest DSL business, Rackspace, and Amazon Cloud instances since Saturday through today. Working through the UI to log into accounts is equally painful with constant fail whales after two to three attempts. Seems like a couple of bad hair days so far and very difficult to get much done. I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this unless we're the only ones affected.
[twitter-dev] Re: Duplicate Tweets
I see @ mention abusers as a different breed because for the most part their Tweets are not technically duplicates. They are complete pollution for sure and harder for an individual user to stop preemptively. At least if someone is annoyed with recurring or duplicate tweets they can simply unfollow that account and there's a self regulating mechanism. Ultimately the real pollution issue is the @ mention system itself, not recurring Tweets on individual accounts. If Twitter wants to clean up the pollution, as they put in their message to Dewald, they would have a lot easier time rooting out @ mention spammers than trying to figure out some pattern of recurring Tweets looking back into history. You can usually determine an @mention spammer by looking at the first 5-10 Tweets and simply counting the @ symbols. The DM system is already polluted beyond hope. @ mentions are right on the heels of being useless to businesses trying to track the brand. In the grand scheme of Twitter problems, it seems to me that recurring Tweets are way down on the list and I think they're pulling a real tool out of the grasp of many businesses, enough that I don't know whether I can honestly suggest a business spend time on Twitter.
[twitter-dev] Re: Duplicate Tweets
Isn't it the case they reject duplicate Tweets if you try to post the same thing twice consecutively? I've not seen them reject duplicate Tweets if there is intervening posts. Personally I think this is a really bad move on Twitter's part. Because of the streaming model of Twitter itself and the fact that not every follower will see every Tweet that you do, not being able to do recurring Tweets leaves businesses without the ability to economically get a consistent message out onto their account. It also looks like a very anti-competitive move to all the ad stream businesses out there. Certainly there are some ad companies that have abused recurring Tweets, but without the ability to do recurring Tweets, the motivation for many businesses to maintain a presence on Twitter just dropped because there's no better way to capitalize on the labor and expense of building and maintaining a following. So much about promotion of business has to do with consistent message and creating brand presence with that consistent message. Is Twitter carving out space now to do their own in-stream ad busines? Are businesses shut out that want to promote themselves on their own account without having to assign a person with a paycheck to get a simple and repetitive task done? A short sighted move it seems to me. If Twitter doesn't want businesses on their service then they're going in the right direction.
[twitter-dev] Batches of suspended users added back to social graphs
I'm noticing from id lists pulled this morning that overnight there appears to have been a large number of suspended ids added back to various accounts. Have I just not been watching closely or has anyone else noticed this? Randy
[twitter-dev] JSON id order reversed
I have come to realize that sometime between 3pm and 6pm PDT on 7/21 the JSON order of following ids reversed from oldest=>youngest to youngest=>oldest and has been in the latter order since then. Did I miss an announcement that this was going to happen? More importantly, is this the way the array order will be maintained from here on? It has raised some havoc figuring out which direction to go for older or more recent following when holding an id that was followed some time in the past. I only work with the JSON format and so I have no insight into the xml side of this question. Thanks for your help.
[twitter-dev] Re: New Twist To Follow Terms Violations
The way I read the actual text it suggests that following and then unfollowing in a short period of time is the violation...not that you can't unfollow someone who didn't follow you. In fact, isn't following someone who doesn't want to follow you back a form of stalking for some people? I've always taken it as a given that it's a courtesy to not continue following someone indefinitely if they're not following back. There are exceptions of course depending on the person or topic and how that person is operating their account and whether they are a public or private entity. http://twitter.zendesk.com/forums/26257/entries/18311
[twitter-dev] Tweets not getting to search.twitter.com
I have a client whose account recently changed names after they fought for successful control of their name from another Twitter user who parked on it. However, Tweets on this account name are not searchable. The account is not protected. Has anyone ever had this happen? How do you get Tweets back into the search stream? It's like they somehow inherited some bad juju from the old account owner. My client put in support tickets that have not been addressed. One was summarily closed with no explanation. Thanks, Randy C
[twitter-dev] Re: This method requires a POST.
Mandakini, I ran into a similar problem a while back and tracked it down to the latest version of CURL. When I pulled an earlier version of CURL for PHP from one of my servers that didn't have this problem and installed it on the server in question it worked fine. I never did track it any further to figure out why the latest version of CURL had this issue. Perhaps someone out there can tell us a configuration trick. But it was clear that somewhere in the depths of CURL (for PHP anyway) POST calls were being turned into GET with the latest version of CURL. Hope that helps. Randy C
[twitter-dev] Re: daily follow/unfollow/update limit
Doug, I think this is very similar to the email I sent in to a...@twitter.com. We've been getting inexplicably blocked from following on accounts we're managing that have < 1.0 following/ follower ratio, large numbers of followers, less than 60/hour following rates, less than 300/day following, etc. It seems that there are daily limits anywhere from 100 to 300 similar to the Chris Latko query earlier: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/74a1b30352a93927# Perhaps the operations changed even though the stated rules or policies didn't? Any insights you can provide would be truly appreciated. RandyC webpartner.com
[twitter-dev] Support request Bermuda Triangle?
A few times I've put in specific API operation tickets to the Twitter Support page that were specific to a particular account. Two days ago I put one in on a particular account. It sat in the "Waiting to be assigned" state for a couple of days. Then this morning it disappeared. I thought maybe it had been answered and so I went to the resolved list. There was nothing in the list. I didn't have any email in my inbox for this account either. It just seems to have fallen into the support request Bermuda Triangle. This is not the first time this has happened. Is this the proper way to get account specific API questions done in private? There is a menu designation for this type of trouble ticket so it seemed like a legitimate path. Thanks for your help. Randy
[twitter-dev] Following/Follower delay
After about 14 hours since the fix was issued (http:// status.twitter.com/post/129574488/update-on-follower-following- problems) I still have a number of accounts that appear out of synch. Is the fix still working its way through the system or should we begin to report accounts that still don't match between their social graph id lists and what the web based view of the account is reporting? Thanks.
