A couple of weeks ago, my Twitter “tweet count” went from over 3100 to under 100. That was one of those periods when Twitter “was having some problems,” so I did not pay that much attention to it. I figured they would restore the count in a couple of days, and all would be right with the world again.
Ah, not so. It has been more than two weeks and still the count is low (it’s above 100 because I’ve continued to tweet, but it should be above 3200). So, a couple of days ago I submitted a support ticket to them, and am still waiting for it to be assigned to someone at the help desk.
Before submitting the ticket, I checked other tickets to see if anyone else had the problem. I noticed that there were several instances where people said their tweet counts were down, but that TweetStats.com showed the correct count, meaning that their tweets were not actually lost. In my case, though, TweetStats shows what the current Twitter count shows, meaning, apparently, that Twitter lost over 3000 of my tweets.
So, Twitter: if you’ve got my tweets in The Cloud, I’d like to know which cloud, please.
If Twitter ever recovers my tweets, I’ll update this post accordingly. Regardless, though, I wish I had backed up my tweets before this happened. I’ve become all too accustomed to thinking that The Cloud will take care of my data. This episode with Twitter has put that in perspective. Of course not every organization screws up as much as Twitter does. Nonetheless, now know I need to backup everything I can.
Update: Twitter fixed the problem on 2 Sep 2009, finding all of my tweets and putting them back in my account. The ticket resolution did not explain what had gone wrong, but I must say that they handled everything very professionally and courteously. Good job by the overworked Twitter staff.