clockwork s'Mart

Updated 22nd & 23rd June 2009

Just sent this email to the BBC’s Click program, hopefully they will be able to investigate..

Hi Click, I would like to highlight a issue thousands or tweeters as well as myself currently experiencing with our mutual friend Twitter..

You can see from the link, that I’m just one of 2,000+ people (People are missing from Find People search) that have been silenced by a bug in search that Twitter doesn’t seem to be looking at, and it seems that more and more are experiencing the same problem on a daily basis.

So what’s the symptoms? Not appearing on search may not seem like a bit issue, but imagine if the BBC website suddenly stopped showing up on Google ?! The effect in Twitter is the same – no-one can find your tweets anymore, if you reply to more than 1 person at a time *ONLY* the first person will get the message;

“@mate1 @mate2 Hi Guys” – only @mate1 will ever see the message.

Why? Because all Twitter clients on PC, MAC, iPhone etc supplement incoming tweets using the Twitter search engine (it saves Twitter API calls) If you’re not in search you’ll only be seen by a few. Being the search engine, it also means that in some cases you won’t show up in the people search tool.

I hope you’ll be able to investigate this issue and get some information, as repeatedly victims receive helpdesk updates saying the issue has been fixed; which it hasn’t. If you wish to see my case log with Twitter, please let me know.

If you are experiencing the same problems; perhaps you can send the BBC an email as well…

UPDATE: 22nd June 2009

Soon after posting this entry I found that I was back on search, so it seemed it wasn’t a difficult “fix” – I’m leaving this post up and will still promote it for the guys lurking in anonymity due to the lack of twitter search.

Stick with it guys, don’t give up.

UPDATE: 23rd June 2009

After almost 24hrs of basking in the love of the Twitter search engine, it looks like I’ve been dropped again like a hot potato, my history is no longer being recorded

After reading through the continuing pleads or Tweeters that had been silenced @fellen may have identified the root cause; an over zealous SPAM blocker routine – fellen says:

so – I saw an earlier post that some of us might be caught in an automatic SPAM blocker – that is if you post a lot of TWEETS with links or mulitple tweets with same content,etc – - you will get put into a SPAM prison by TWEET central – I know I am not an SPAMMER  - but have posted lots of TWEETS with links as well as posted TWEETS with same content mutiple times to include multiple #hash tags to workaround character limits on the TWEET itself – so who knew – I am groveling and asking for a release from SPAM prison – because I thnk that might be why I no longer show up on SEARCHES – - stay tuned