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Twitter Lists Causing Trouble for Fail Whale?

By Matthew Ellis
November 30, 2009
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Twitter ListsIt seems in the past few minutes, Twitter Lists have been disabled. Only implemented a few weeks ago, the lists feature is the prime suspect in causing the influx of ‘fail whales’ appearing on Twitter. After taking a quick look at the Status Blog, it seems they are aware of the high error rate and are ‘looking in to it‘.

Update: They have confirmed Twitter Lists will be temporarily disabled until a full diagnosis of the cause of the error is made.

There’s been some speculation as to the cause, but it seems a little coincidental that a range of major Twitter clients such as Tweetie and Tweetdeck have all released software updates with the ‘Lists’ feature and within 24 hours, it’s causing massive disruption. It’s possible the feature is resource-intensive and thus causing problems for Twitter’ servers.

Regardless of the cause, I’m sure this isn’t the end of the line for Twitter Lists, it’ll be revived in a matter of no time, I’m sure. Irrespective, I’m hoping not to see Mr. Fail Whale, over and over any time soon!

We’ll update this post as soon as there are any updates.

Update: At approximately 11:30pm, Twitter Lists came back online. Taken from the Twitter Status Blog: ‘Update: (3:30p): We have turned the Lists feature back on.’

So no explanation as to what happened, odd…I’m just glad they’re back online. Just another day at the Twitter Office some might say!

http://status.twitter.com/post/263867698/responding-to-high-error-rateun
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  • Interesting that the list outage occurs the same day that Twitter's most popular 3rd party app launches "Lists" support. Bad news for all parties involved.
  • Yeah, quite coincidental really.
  • Twitter's list feature is better than WeFollow, imho. but it's kinda strange that if you follow a list, you do not automatically follow everyone on that list. i'd like that, hope they add this while they squash the bug.
  • I'm not sure I'd like an auto-follow feature for lists - an optional one would be ok. There are a few ways to use lists:

    1) To manage subset groups of your own that you want to follow (like groups in Tweetdeck and other clients). To me, this is the minor use.

    2) To let someone else curate a large list of key tweeters to follow on a particular topic. For example, GamePro has done this with video game folks: http://twitter.com/gamepro/videogames. Those lists are living, dynamic lists, with entities/people being added and dropped as they move into and out of the relevant list topic in their careers. You shouldn't just add everyone in such a list to your own follow list. Instead, follow that whole list, and let the curator manage the task of moving people in and out of the list as appropriate.
  • Simon
    No big loss - don't really 'get' lists anyway :(
  • Simon
    ...and I'm sure Travelodge will be happy to see the back of them:

    http://cheezburger.com/View.aspx?aid=2864882176
  • Simon
    ... and I'm sure Travelodge would be happy to see the back of them:

    http://cheezburger.com/View.aspx?aid=2864882176
  • So that's why, I was quite shocked to see Twitter Lists feature was out of site this morning. As much as I love Lists, I'm glad Twitter team is going for some bug-fix for a better user-experience. Certainly not hoping to see much of fail-whale due to the congestion.

    I would prefer to use lists as an organizer to keep track of real time updates from certain groups of people. To auto-follow everyone on the list is not that necessary, I prefer to have that as an optional pick after I get to know them better.

    @wchingya
    Social/Blogging Tracker
  • jack
    hello all
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