Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Missing your profile picture?

tbridge:

funsizebytes:

twitterstatus:

We’re working on a bug whereby the default avatar is showing up for users who have previously uploaded their own image. We hope to resolve this soon.

AND they’re doing this fun thing where if you re-upload your missing picture, they lose it AGAIN!

Least fun Twitter week ever.

I dunno about that.  I can remember some fail-whale heavy weeks when Twitter was pretty much unusable.  Yeah, I’m missing some people in my timeline, and I’m sure they’re missing their stars, but I just can’t get exercised about something I’m not paying for.

I would like there to be a way to pay for better support, or pay for better service, but those models aren’t available yet.  And, truth be told, I’m still seeing 90%+ of my tweets.  Yeah, Favrd I’m sure isn’t as exciting as it could be this week, but dammit, we’re rolling old-skool this week.

Either that, or ya’ll are understanding what it is to be me, what without any stars on thars.

It’s really not the stars.

Twitter in the past was “binary”: working or broken.

If you didn’t get the whale, Twitter was working.

Now I’ve had multiple people who are missing from my feeds. Then sending DMs doesn’t work 20 times in a row, and then it does, and then it stops again.

Tweetie has, several times, stopped updating flat. It has been robust until now, so there’s another level of silent failure.

So instead of “being broken” or “working” it’s a little of both. When I’ve tried to use it, it hasn’t worked right, which makes me think that it isn’t working a lot more. And so I stop looking.

And just when you think they might be fixing the “secure connection” problem, which has been going on a week or more, they roll out new default avatars instead.

“Hey, don’t be so hard on them, they were probably working on this for awhile now and it was ready, so why not release it?”

Which would have been all well and good until the new default avatars (another word I can’t stand, btw) start overwriting the ones people have uploaded themselves.

So now they’re trying to put out a new fire (avatar bungling) when the old one (missing updates) isn’t fixed, and the older one (secure connection failed) still isn’t fixed and they’ve given no indication that they really know what’s causing it.

Twitter isn’t equipped to deal with multiple fires at once. They seem to have quite a small staff, and I realize that the design people who work on the avatars/css/etc are probably not same people who can figure out the secure connection errors… but my guess is that the people who have to figure out the avatars problems are the same people who have to figure out the secure connection problem.

If my car breaks down then I fix it and it works, I’m likely to trust it and want to use it.

If my car breaks down and I fix it and then something else breaks down and I fix it and something else breaks down and I fix that, I’m not going to trust it or want to use it. Especially if the first repair didn’t quite work.

Am I leaving Twitter? No. Is Twitter doing a better job of weaning me off Twitter than I could do myself? Yes. Will I go back when things are seem “really fixed”? Probably.

But this latest string of problems is not like the old set of problems, at least not to me. Now even when Twitter seems to be working I don’t trust that it’s working.