If you do anything in social media or with social media these days, then you have heard of or use Twitter. You are familiar with the occasional Fail Whale sightings, the scalability issues, the oddities and quirks. If you are a typical Twitter user, you have even formed a bond with each other around the eccentricities of Twitter.

Today and yesterday Twitter came close to a revolution, a massive exodus of people. Today was definitely the worst day for Twitter public relations that they’ve had, and since they have had some doozies that is saying a lot. What happened to cause such a fuss?

To understand what happened you first need to “get” that Twitter has its own brand of “currency”. These are the people you follow, and the people who follow you. I find them both equally important, but some people only look at one or the other – depending on what they want to get out Twitter, conversations and connections or ego boosting. To each their own, in my opinion.

When the Twitter community logged in a little more than a day ago, they noticed something peculiar – all of the people they followed (listened to) and that followed them (listened to them) seemed… gone. A database error had occurred, tanking people’s numbers dramatically (I was without nearly 300 people I follow and 300 that follow me for the entire outage) Some heavy Twitter users lost thousands (Chris Brogan lost 3,000).

The Twitter nation was in a tailspin! Twitter users were up in arms! You see without the conversations and connections – Twitter is worthless. It can survive down time, turning replies off and on, losing instant messaging for a while, losing the With Friends tab, and more. But the painful lesson that Ev and Biz (hopefully) learned today is that Twitter can not survive without the connections.

They also had a bit of a public relations issue at first in how they handled the loss. At first the company tried to blame it on getting rid of spam bots and everyone was ok with that. Then people realized they gained spam and lost friends and the anger mounted. At one point Ev, Biz, Jack and crew had to retract that original statement and admit they had screwed up – screwed up royally.

Once they were honest, the Twitter users were as forgiving as always. Why they weren’t up front about the problem in the beginning is beyond me. I was quite vocal in my displeasure at losing the people I follow and that follow me – without conversation my job is much harder, and those 24 hours were torture trying to get things done without my network of people I rely on for various bits of valuable input and information. If I’d known what was going on right away, I would have just gone to FriendFeed for a while and come back later.

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Entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 2:06 am under Social Media.

Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
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