Back on the 27th of July my Twitter account was compromised. Twitter, as massive as it now is, is inevitably subject to countless brute force dictionary attacks. Just my luck, someone managed to gain access to my account and began to post advertisements. Apparently they had posted the exact same thing on a great number of accounts that they had taken control of. Being that I’m always connected to the internet through some means it didn’t take me long to realize what had happened and I immediately changed the password on the account. The damage was minimal and I resumed normal Twitter activities for the next to days until I received a message from Twitter:

“Your account was suspended for cross-posting duplicate tweets across multiple accounts, a violation of our terms of service and the Twitter Rules that we take very seriously. Your account will remain suspended for a minimum of one week; you may petition for reinstatement on or after August 5, 2009.”

Mind you, this was two entire days later. I actually got three duplicates of this email, which was indicative of their poor support system even though I didn’t know it at the time. I contacted support making a case that my account was compromised and that I was development community memeber who has been using Twitter since it 2006 when it was called Twittr. I never heard back. In fact I double checked on my requests into the “ZenDesk” ticketing system only to see that they had already been marked as resolved and closed without so much as a comment or any actual resolution. I then tried to issue a number of additional support tickets and realized that they AUTOMATICALLY marked themselves as resolved the moment you submit them. Through some miracle I was able to get an open ticket into the system and it has been pending assignment to an operator for ten days now.

Case and point, Twitter support is a complete joke. The more I read about and mistaken mass suspensions, support issues, and consider your bad track record for downtime the more I wonder about whether Twitter will be able to make the shift into an actual revenue generating company. Currently it isn’t able to sustain its own service. This should be a very disheartening prospect for bandwagon venture capitalists who are funneling big dollars into the Twitter for its trending potential. I wonder if the VC’s who are giving TweetDeck 3.2mil for continued development, or any of the other Twitter apps that are being mysteriously funded, are aware of the shaky foundation their livelihood rests upon.

Twitter, you’ve managed to creative perhaps the biggest social media platform to succeed instant messaging: get your shit together. As with the saturation of your service you have accepted the responsibility to make it stable and supported. History makes quick work of social media sites that explode on the scene and are poorly maintained. Consider the failures of Myspace and the ultimately victorious Facebook. Remember how great life was for Yahoo before Google? Be careful that you aren’t laying the foundation for your replacement. And VC’s, start looking for the new Twitter now.

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