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March 18th, 2009 • 18:03

Twitter “OFF”

I have been one of the greatest advocates of using Twitter.  I use them every day  for two years and loving it.  Lately they have been getting on my nerves to a point that I am yelling at them.  One of the major attractions to using Twitter is the ability to update via short messaging service (SMS), or text.  It is so convenient to send a text message and know that it is updating my Twitter page, my Facebook page, and my personal web site all at the same time. 

From my cell phone I can send a text message “on” or “off” to turn notifications on or off to my cell phone.  This way if I have to be in a meeting I can just send “off” and the notifications stop until I turn them back on.  Lately I have been sending “off” and it has not been taking effect right away.  In fact in some cases it does not take effect for more than four hours.  This is completely unacceptable.  Even putting my phone on vibrate does not help when I am getting continuous flows of messages when I am in a meeting.

Another thing that it does is keeps me from getting the messages from those that I do want to talk to.  When I am in a meeting for an hour and a half and I come out with 20+ Twitter messages on my phone, I tend to ignore them.  When someone in my family sends me a text message it gets ignored because of the endless messages coming in after I told it to stop.  A couple nights ago it was doing this and I got so mad that I sent “off” over and over and over again where I probably sent “off 20+ times.  The messages kept coming.  When I got up for work in the morning I had 40+ messages from Twitter and most of them were my “off” confirmations that I sent telling it to stop.

It does not take a rocket scientist to see this would get old fast.  Tonight it is doing it again.  I have already sent “off” a dozen times and I am STILL getting messages.  Am I the only one that is having this problem?  Unlike many people I use the “on” and “off” commands regularly because I have to work or sleep.  I leave my phone on 24 hours a day because most people I talk to call me on it.  If there is an emergency, that is the number that people will likely call me on so turning off the phone when I go to bed is not an option.

I just submitted a troubleshooting request with Twitter to see if they can find out what is going on.  I hate to cancel my service but if this is what it comes to then I guess I have no choice.  I am approaching 7,000 Twitter messages at this time so I use them quite heavily.  Twitter, fix  this problem!

  • I have not given up yet but I have learned to not turn on notifications on times where I have to go somewhere.
  • Marian
    I have been having the same problem. That is why I stopped using it. It was getting to be a real pain.
  • Hey Kelly,

    Thanks for the input. What you say makes a lot of sense. It could be my carrier as well. I do not hear anyone else complaining. Maybe it is because I am following a lot of people meaning I get a message from someone every minute or so. Thanks again for the input.

    Paul
  • Based on what I know, there are two possible sources of the problem.

    One of them is that Twitter's servers are backlogged, so that when you turn off messaging, it stops sending them, but still sends the ones queued up from between when you sent the request and when they processed it. That's something Twitter can and should fix: they should have some mechanism to purge queued SMSes when the "off" command is received. "Off" commands should also be processed at a higher priority than other requests.

    The second is that your provider is getting backlogged on sending Twitter's SMSes to you, possibly reordering them in the process. IIRC SMS is a "best effort" protocol and there's no guarantee that SMSes will be received in the order that they're sent. There's not much Twitter can do about that.
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