Favstar.fm

Over the last couple of weeks, Favstar has missed deleting some tweets that users have deleted on Twitter, and has sometimes missed collecting a retweet or favorite.

It’s become my top priority to get this resolved, and I’d like to share a little more detail about what’s going on, and what’s being done about it.

The way that Favstar receives information from Twitter regarding deleted tweets is via a new product from Twitter called Sitestreams. Sitestreams allow Twitter to push Favstar signals that tell Favstar when a tweet is deleted, or a tweet is retweeted.  

Until about 2 weeks ago, Favstar has been working fantastically well with very good reliability.  Over the last 2 weeks, it hasn’t been working as well as it has previously.

Unfortunately there’s a large number of working parts involved, so it’s proven difficult to track down what’s going wrong.  

I’ve been working with engineers both at Twitter, Softlayer (who host Favstar’s servers and networking infrastructure), and reviewing Favstar’s internal systems to improve logging to determine what’s going wrong.  A few links in the chain have been identified as potential failure points, and all three parties are working on improving the reliability.  I’m not certain how long it’s going to take, but I expect in the next week or two the problems will be resolved, and the service will be more reliable again.

In the mean time, if you have deleted a tweet and it remains on Favstar, feel free to DM me a link to it on Favstar and I’ll remove it for you.  Please be aware that I won’t always be able to do this immediately, but I will get to it.  

Thanks for your patience with this issue.  

Tim
@favstar