Tag Archives: technology

Why I Haven’t Been Twittering Much Lately

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You may have noticed, fellow tweeps, that I’ve been kinda quiet on the twitters lately. It’s because I’m still annoyed, at both @twitter and myself, for losing the first 500 posts of my twittering life.

twitter-logoYou see, I knew, albeit in the back of my mind, about Twitter’s arbitrary 3,200 tweet history rule. That’s the rule that says no application that taps into the Twitter API, including the twitter.com website itself, will let you go back any further than 3,200 posts. I’d heard that that was the limit, but somehow it didn’t really register with me and before I knew it, I was at just over 3,700 tweets.

So what happened to the first 500? Hell if I know. I’ve seen other blog posts that say they exist. Even Twitter’s own documentation supports this:

Clients may request up to 3,200 statuses via the page and count parameters for timeline REST API methods. Requests for more than the limit will result in a reply with a status code of 200 and an empty result in the format requested. Twitter still maintains a database of all the tweets sent by a user. However, to ensure performance of the site, this artificial limit is temporarily in place.

(While writing this blog post, I checked my Twitter page and now it claims I have 3,861 tweets. Except that I know for a fact that it was at 3,708 over the weekend. And I’ve only tweeted a handful of times this week. So what the hell is going on over there?)

Twitter needs to get its act together. Maybe if they hadn’t spurned Facebook, they could afford servers that weren’t held together by chicken wire and duct tape. If being able to request more than 3,200 posts (which, at 140 characters apiece, amounts to LESS THAN 1 whole megabyte) could potentially crash the system, than a DoS attack should be the least of their worries.

So getting back to what I knew and when I knew it…

There was a point in time that I could retrieve all my tweets. I paged backward through the site and got back to tweet #1. But did I do anything about it? Make any attempt to save them? Of course not. I figured they were there in the cloud for whenever I needed them. I didn’t realize that that wasn’t quite true.

And so we’re here today, with Twitter’s self-described “artificial limit” of 3,200 lousy tweets. Hey, I really can live without all the live-tweeting I did of Redskins games. But I’m missing most of last year, the year my daughter was born and all the firsts that go along with that. These are my memories, and I’d really like them back.

Sure, I have the photos, and a few blog posts from here of the things I’ve done with my kids, but I’m really a short-form type of person. I don’t keep journals, diaries or blogs up very well as my friends can attest to. But Twitter has been so convenient for me, always at hand on my iPhone, that I’ve used it to keep a de facto log of my life.

I’m pissed at Twitter for holding those memories hostage, and I’m pissed at myself for not taking action before it was too late to save those first 500 (600?) tweets.

So that’s why I’ve been down on Twitter lately. I’m not going to stop tweeting, but I am going to be a little bitter about all this until it’s rectified. And I’m taking steps to get my intellectual property from this point on onto my own equipment as well and not rely anymore on Twitter’s cloud.

An Open Response to Lowell McAdam’s Open Response

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Recently, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue wrote a blog article (and made, with help from his Twitter followers, a video) highlighting just some of the many, many things wrong with the cell phone industry beyond just the exclusivity contracts currently being investigated by Congress.

In response, Mr. Lowell C. McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, sent Mr. Pogue’s boss, New York Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, an open letter rebutting these complaints.  Except for the fact that he didn’t actually rebut any of Mr. Pogue’s complaints.  Instead, he made up his own “myths”, and debunked them with his own opinions.  Not exactly the same thing.  So I’ll give the same treatment to Mr. McAdam, except I will actually address the topics he brings up instead of conveniently ignoring them:

Myth #1: Americans pay more for wireless service.
Europeans don’t pay for calls or text messages that they receive.  Americans do.  So okay, I could choose to not answer a call from a number I don’t recognize, and then I wouldn’t be charged for it (except indirectly if I call into the voicemail to check any message left).  But text messages don’t give me that option.  If a spammer sends me a text message, and I don’t have one of those ludicrous text messaging “plans”, then I’m out 20 cents whether I like it or not.  This is patently unfair.

Myth #2: The Wireless sector of the technology industry is not competitive.
His answer to this is that Al Gore says it is.  Sorry, dude, that’s not an argument. Exclusivity deals keep consumers bound to a provider if that is the only provider offering a particular handset (yes, I’m talking about AT&T and the iPhone; isn’t everyone else?). 2 year contracts keep me tied to my provider if I want to switch for any reason, including needing to upgrade a broken or lost phone with a different model not offered by my current carrier.  Lack of decent coverage by some of the smaller, hungrier carriers such as Cricket mean I’m tied to the big boys if I want to know my phone will work in a major urban area or a small rural area.  Just because Al says it’s competitive, doesn’t mean it’s so.

Myth #3: Wireless customers are treated badly.
An 84% approval rating may be stellar in politics, but in customer service it’s meh. At least, it should be. A company’s motto (coined by Scott Bourne) should not be “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.” My own dealings with AT&T customer service have found them to be a massive monolith of corporate “We say so” bureacracy. Does that sound like I’m satisfied with them?

Myth #4: The big wireless companies don’t pay attention to rural America’s needs.
Here, Mr. McAdam touts Verizon’s dedication to expanding their network. In my pre-iPhone days, both I and my mother had Verizon and we could not use our cell phones inside her rural-ish-but-not-quite southern New Jersey house, and we’re not talking Timbuktu here, we’re talking 40 miles from Philadelphia! Cingular, AT&T’s predecessor, had ZERO coverage in Fremont, California, the fourth largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I understand the situation has not improved with their acquisition of AT&T’s network.  It’s a simple fact that wireless companies go where the money is, and the money is just not in areas with sparser populations even though they would benefit the most from having reliable wireless phone coverage.

None of this actually covers any of Mr. Pogue’s charges (outrageous pricing for text messages, the way phone subsidies work, etc.).  I’m still waiting to see answers to those issues.