Over the last ten days, many Twitter users have found the total counts listed by their profile off by as much as three times. While the focus of the popular microblogging service is around the conversations and links, statistics and numbers continue to draw attention, so such a massive change has people asking questions. Meanwhile, the company's help forum shows the bug was initially a low priority issue, anticipated to only impact a few users, since found to be much more widespread.

The team is working on it, and expects it to be resolved "relatively soon", with the latest update posted Friday, February 5th.


The issue does not impact anyone's ability to send updates or see updates from others. It also does not mean that tweets were previously sent in triplicate, nor does it mean their are ghost tweeters updating on your behalf, so the bug is a minor one, albeit annoying for those who like to keep their data clean.


The known issue, titled as "inflated tweet count" was posted to the help forum on January 25th, and users affected were asked to identify themselves, while showing what the anticipated disparity was between actual usage and reported usage. By February 2nd, Twitter's team said it was "a low priority issue" and said they "did not expect to have this issue fixed in the immediate future for this reason". But by Friday, the tone had changed. An update said, "This problem is now important and have engineers currently working on resolving the improper tweet counts."


Like the examples I am including here, my own stats have been tripled, from what is likely in the range of 4,300 updates to more than 12,000. Not a big deal to me, but others are asking in public, and I thought it made sense to show Twitter is working on it. Like other occasional stats-related bumps on the service in the past, I would assume this to be reversed relatively quickly. And if it's not, there's always TweetStats.

TweetStats: Closed Since Sunday Afternoon
On Sunday, we mentioned Twitter had run into a bug that masked the display of third party clients on the service, erroneously reporting all updates as coming from "Web", whether they were, or if they were instead from the mobile interface or any of the growing array of applications that interact with the microblogging leader. Now into Tuesday, the bug hasn't yet been fixed, and in the meantime, popular statistics tracker TweetStats has been shut down - incapable of operating correctly with bad data pouring in.

Twitter's API team is telling developers that the "from Web" issue is the result of large growth in the company's database, thanks to a recent increase in API developers and their registering applications to work with OAuth. The database object reportedly grew to a size incapable of being cached, dramatically impacting performance.

Still a small company, rather than push for Twitter's engineers to come in over the weekend to resolve the issue, the company said they chose the "quick solution", opting to "disable source parameters", according to postings on their Twitter API forum here.

Initial guidance was that the issue would be resolved "likely early in June 1 workday" (sic), but more issues have cropped up. The company followed up with a second note saying, "Due to problems with other *critical* code we've had to delay deployment of this fix until tomorrow."


TweetStats Reports The Trouble Sunday
TweetStats shut down mid-day Sunday after the issue had impacted the statistics gathering service dramatically. And while Twitter has again offered a new date of resolution, the developer, Damon Cortesi, has said he'll find a way to get rebooted, with or without help from Twitter.


TweetStats Hopes for Best, But Prepares...
He noted late Monday night, "If not fixed tomorrow AM, will re-open and deal with the consequences."

Jesse Stay has more around the details of the API issue here: Where is Twitter’s Emergency Response System?

In technology, if you can measure an activity and compare it with that of other users, it's likely somebody is working on a service to crunch the numbers. Twitter has TweetStats and following counts. FeedBurner shows RSS subscribers. LinkedIn displays the number of connections. And FriendFeed displays following counts, as well as likes and comments activity, on your profile. But the service, in its latest upgrade, removed the ability to analyze your own feed and see which friends were most active on your thread. Into that void walks a new service from the team at Microblink, called Feedstats.info.

Feedstats.info essentially provides the same information that previously was available to all FriendFeed users, but not just for your own account - opening up the ability to analyze anybody's activity, so long as you know their user name.


Entering the ID into Feedstats.info

The data says I use Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed most often.
If you enter a FriendFeed user's ID into Feedstats.info, you can see how often they post per day (in the last 1,000 items), what services contributed to that feed (both in bar chart and pie chart form). You can see what days and what times of day the user most frequently uses FriendFeed, and also, who provides the most likes and comments on their items.


FeedStats Shows I Use FriendFeed Least On Weekends, and from 1 to 7 a.m.

FeedStats Also Shows Who Has Activity On My Items
Using this service, you can see which users log in to FriendFeed at specific intervals during the day, and those who are pretty much on the service around the clock, stopping only to sleep (I assume). You can also, if you check enough accounts, get a good idea as to who the most prolific people are in terms of "liking" activity, especially if they lead many different accounts.


FeedStats Takes A Look at Rochelle

Hutch Carpenter Under the Microscope
As with most stat sites, it's easy to start playing with the charts, and equally as easy to ask, "what's the point?" At what point does knowing the data is there start to impact user behavior? Should Rob Diana stop sharing so frequently on Google Reader if he finds out that it's nearly 90 percent of his feed? Should I be using Twitter more or FriendFeed less? Or the other way around?


Rob Diana: Google Reader Expert

Jesse Stay Uses Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed.
One of the assumed corollaries offered by Feedstats.info is a guess that those who like your items have a high compatibility with you, making them most "like" you. But what I found is that there is a small subset of users with a tremendous number of likes and comments, far outstripping mine, and they may lead my account as well as others, making our correlation a false one. But other than that, it's still an interesting set of data to play with. You can sign in with your FriendFeed API key, and can check any account, as I have.

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Damon Cortesi, the man behind TweetStats, DM Whacker, and First Follow, has just made my life a whole lot easier by allowing me to learn more about the people I follow through search. The service, called TweepSearch, aims to allow you to search for specific people you want to find amongst the people you follow.



Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

In TweetDeck's five months of public availability following the Adobe AIR Twitter client's debut in July, the product has seen significant usage growth, battling for market share against competition like Twhirl, and becoming the standard for power users of the microblogging service who want to see all their friends' updates as well as search terms, and have the ability to group followers at the same time. On Monday, PR 2.0's Brian Solis measured TweetDeck as having delivered a full 3.8% of all tweets, and I've personally seen this number as high as 6%, according to TweetStats.


The New TweetDeck: Click for Full Size
As with any service that gains in popularity, demands become greater on the product's developers, and TweetDeck is no exception. Author Iain Dodsworth is planning to release a new version of the product on December 24th (tomorrow), with a long list of new features, including:

• Adding sent direct messages to the direct message (DM) column.
• An added spell checker
• The addition of a "narrow columns" option
• Integration of TweetShrink
• The introduction of new TweetDeck Services

TweetDeck Will Display Narrower Columns
One of the few concerns I've seen voiced regarding TweetDeck is that it can be a screen real estate hog. Once you start with a column showing your friends' tweets, add a Replies column and Direct Messages, pretty soon you're giving up a good chunk of your monitor. With that in mind, Dodsworth has both updated the interface to make it slimmer, but also added the aforementioned "narrow columns" option. The addition of sent DMs in the DM column also makes sense, essentially showing the conversation in full, assuming you are both sending and receiving DMs with the same Twitter users.


The New TweetDeck Integrates Spell Check
The addition of TweetShrink to TweetDeck also helps to bail you out in the event you have something to say, but just can't seem to keep it down to a mere 140 characters.

For example, the note: "Will it reduce the number of characters in my message or tell me what to cut?" is shortened to "Will it reduce the number of characters in my msg or tell me what 2 cut?", saving me five characters. Who knows when that could come in handy? It also reduces common words like "and" to &, for example.

Also interesting is the addition of the first of what is expected to be many TweetDeck Services, that enables additional information from outside of TweetDeck to be displayed. In this version, there is an undocumented feature that injects your follower data in the top of the replies column as the application is started, powered by twittercounter.com. Dodsworth promises more will be integrated along the way.

TweetDeck has already become the go-to Twitter application for many of Twitter's most-active users, including Ross Mayfield, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Darren Rowse, Mark Krynsky and Guy Kawasaki. Dodsworth hopes the latest updates will gain even more conversions, and you can already see the buzz building around the new TweetDeck in Twitter:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TweetDeck

You can expect to see the newest version of TweetDeck hit the Web on Christmas Eve, December 24th.