Avid Twitter users will be aware of all the ongoing problems the social network has suffered recently. Tweet counts have been decimated, entire tweets have gone missing and the Fail Whale has been on my screen so often I was beginning to think it was actually my screen saver.

I personally like to blame football for all this drama, the World Cup has put Twitter under enormous pressure and though they thought they would be prepared for all those extra tweets some bigger issues with high growth thingies on servers and people not monitoring it. (Well everyone is watching the World Cup aren’t they?)

My own account lost about 3000 tweets and it actually left me feeling a little small and insignificant. I guess in the wider scheme of things I am small and insignificant, but it didn’t occur to me until they were gone just how much I measure by those tweets. People looking at my account may have looked at my decimated tweet count and concluded I wasn’t very active or hadn’t been using Twitter very long. It’s a pretty stupid thing to be bothered about but none the less I’m shallow enough that it irked me. The actual real problem for me with all the problems of late has been its effect on third party apps that I’ve been using. I use a lot of these when I’m trying to track social influence and I now face the prospect of throwing out weeks of data because the numbers are going to be totally borked. I’m going to have to find something else to work on until this all gets fixed. (If anyone has any suggestions feel free to let me know.)

Anyway as you’ve gathered from the post heading my tweet count has been fixed, it’s just a shame I missed my 4000th tweet in all the fuss. There goes my chance to mark a milestone with some random geeky quote that hardly anyone will get, but those that do will inwardly chuckle at my witty repartee.