Freelance digital consultant for charities
Twitter is broken and as usual they have a very cute image to let you know. I’ve decided to blog about all the cute error messages I come across, as I find them. So far, as I recall, Twitter is winning on it’s ‘I’m broken’ notices. Although, another site might have the potential to make really nice error messages, but just never break, so you never see them. Is there a name for these pages? Like ‘maintenance’ pages or something?
These aren’t 404’s. These are web server errors due to failures on Twitter’s part.
I just signed up to Twitter and I already think it sucks. A lot.
I’ve come across this post quite a few times in checking to see if Twitter’s broken or not- thought I’d pass along this link as it’s got some good tech to verify in a few different places whether Twitter’s broken or not. It usually says “Yes, No, or-” and this is cute- “sort of.” No frills, pretty nice:
http://www.istwitterbroken.com
“Sort of” comes up when the site monitors trending and chatter around the web and sees that something’s goin’ down. I’ve noticed the API or Direct Messaging being sketchy and others have said the same thing, checked istwitterbroken.com, and “sort of” was there. I’m all about personal validation.
Hope this is helpful to others out there as Twitter figures out its growing pains.
I’m afraid I don’t work with the Twitter API, so I’m not sure of its reliability. Twitter.com itself doesn’t seem to go down very often in my experience, and definitely not much recently.
I’m developing a new website for myself using WordPress, Twitter Plug-ins and Flickr badges and it seems like Twitter’s API has been broken for 2 days now.
At the bottom of the page (the loading time of which is around 30secs because it waits for Twitter to time-out) is a ghastly message that reads “Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80”
Twitter.com isnt broken, it seems to work fine, but the API hasnt worked for 2 days now and (except for 15mins yesterday before breaking again).
I’m new to Twitter and I like that you can pull Twitts into blog homepages – but I really hope this kind of thing doesnt happen often because not only does it fail to display recent Twitts but it makes the site mostly unusable because of loading times.
Does this happen often? Luckily my new site isnt ready yet so it’s not affected any users but if this keeps up I’ll have to set up a cron-job that sucks in Twitts every 20mins and turns it off at all other times because I cant go on like this, it’s worse than back in the day with a 14Kb modem!
Hey Beth,
We’re working on our error messages for Naked at the moment. We call them 404’s, as in Error 404.
Nice idea for a blog categoy, I look forward to seeing more! (It seems weird to look forward to something breaking doesn’t it?)
~biff~
I also thought this was adorable. These little designs almost makes me look forward to Twitter being down.
Also, I’m a digitial projects librarian, and I read your “about me” section and you seem to be working in the same sort of vein as I am. Which is cool, and means I’ll probably be back.
Have a good day!
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