There are big problems with software quality. The problems range from social apps to corporate to academia, include "mission critical" software, and everywhere in between. The social apps in particular have decided it's embarassing. But instead of actually, you know, fixing the problems, they seem to have decided to mask the problems! Twitter is a great example of this disease.
Two ways of Responding when you don't know the Answer
Suppose you're a kid and someone is demanding answers from you. Either you know the answer or you don't. If you know the answer, it's simple: just give the answer!
Q: When did Columbus sail the ocean blue?
A: 1492
If you don't know the answer, there are two ways to respond: the right way and the wrong way. The right way to respond is simple: Just say you don't know!
Q: When did Columbus sail the ocean blue?
A: I don't know.
The wrong way to respond is a little more complicated. You have to guess at an answer, state it as though you knew the answer, and hope no one cares or that the person asking doesn't know either so you can get away with it.
Q: When did Columbus sail the ocean blue?
A: 1542.
When the question you're asked has several answers, you can be wrong in a different way. For example:
Q: Name the ships in Columbus' voyage to the New World.
A: The Nina and the Santa Maria.
Q: Is that all of them?
A: Yes.
Twitter's Response when it doesn't know the answer
I never thought it would happen, but now I have fond feelings for Twitter's Fail Whale, which I haven't seen recently. You would think that the fail whale not showing up as often would be a good sign. It's not. It's a sign that Twitter has decided that it's better to lie than to admit it doesn't know the answer to the question you're asking. Instead of forthrightly saying "I don't know," Twitter now brazenly gives the wrong answer. Even worse, it gives a different wrong answer from one day to the next!
Twitter's Bogus Search results
Here are some screen shots of the results of the identical query, for "blackliszt," over a couple of weeks. I always selected "All results" to remove any excuse that Twitter was selecting the "top" results to help me out.
Let's go through time. Here's the result from the first day, Apr 18:
I tried again the following day, Apr 19, and was quite surprised with the result: the Rebelmouse tweet simply disappeared, pulling an older one into the results!
On Apr 20 I added a tweet and did the search again. My new tweet was there, and RebelMouse came back!
On Apr 22 I tried yet again and got another brand-new variation: this time Cadencia's tweet disappeared!
The results were unchanged on Apr 24 and 25. I gave Twitter a couple days to lose some data, and had my patience rewarded when I searched again on May 1. The first result was Rebelmouse; the most recent posts, my post on ballet, Cadencia and Rob Majteles, were all gone! Here's May 1:
Finally, look at this simple list of my tweets taken Apr 23, not a search:
Note that I had tweets on Apr 10 and Mar 25, both of which included "blackliszt," neither of which appeared in any of the search results!!
Sadly, I can't even claim that the folks at Twitter have it out for me. It's just the way things work there ... uhhh, I mean, the way things don't work there...
Conclusion
Social Media software quality stinks. It's worth every cent you paid for it. Oh, you didn't pay anything for it, you say? Well, that's my point. When a program like Twitter gives you an interface, lets you do a search, gives you a result that's even worse than my "Nina and Santa Maria" answer, brazenly implies that it's the right answer and everyone just ignores the issue, something is wrong.
Q to Twitter exec: Why does your software randomly leave out results from searches? Why should anyone look at "trending tweets" or anything else when the data is randomly bogus?
A: I've never been asked that question before. The answer is simple: I do it because I can, because I don't care, because no one else seems to and because I'm worth a great deal of money and you're not. Next question please.
Thanks to MaryAnn Bekkedahl for inspiring me to write this up.
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