Twitter Weirdness with my followers: Who are they adding & deleting?

Here's a Fri 7/25/08 5:37 am EDT update on the Twitter restore.

50 of my followers reappeared yesterday after the restore, but I looked into my e-mail folders to see if all of them had come back.

After June 4 7:00 pm, my "X is now following you on Twitter" e-mails showed 88 new followers. I had 169 followers + 88 new ones = 257 people. But Twitter only showed 223 people.

(Photo by manx_x at Flickr)
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*** What happened to the missing 34 people? ***
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So I sat down and went through the 1st 44 e-mails one by one. Here's the results:

9 accounts don't exist. Probable SPAMmers closed by Twitter. Thank you Twitter.

3 accounts are SPAMmers: (1) angelina1987 (2) flyupload (3) gerryu88. Again, Thanks Twitter

4 people are legitimate: (1) domanite (2) fotographic (3) marinij_opin (4) MarkDykeman. This is NOT good.

fotographic confirmed that he did not unfollow me.

~3.5% of my FriendFeed followers have unfollowed me, so I would expect ~1.5 unfollows out of 44.

Other weirdness (sync problems, API weirdness):
3 people who follow me DON'T show that link on Less Friends or Twitter Karma (1) evergreenceo (2) CityDance (3) ja_castillo

--- e.g. We're mutually-following, but LF/TK only show that I'm following them.

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Summary: (A) Of the 16 missing people I identified, 75% were probable spammers and 25% legitimate. If the 25% legitimate ones don't come back, then Twitter's anti-SPAM algorithms are way too strong (and not catching all the spammers either...)
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Summary: (B) There is a sync/API problem which makes Less Friends and Twitter Karma unreliable with 10% of my new followers.
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Twitter Status says Thu 7/25/08 11 pm EDT "We have restored 99.6% of the following/followers that temporarily disappeared as a result of a database error. The remaining 0.4% are on their way back."

I don't believe Twitter, given their past history of poor behavior and blaming others.

As Chris Baskind says in Why Twitter Must Die, The problem lies in Twitter’s software code and infrastructure, which wasn’t written with the sort of loads in mind the service must now routinely manage... Nor has it prevented the company from blaming virtually everyone but themselves for their current state of affairs, shutting down basic services, and leaving key segments of its developer community out in the cold.

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There has been a flurry of posts on the Twitter database loss and the new Anti-SPAM initiative problems. Some of my favorites:
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(1) Louis Gray wrote Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail Thu 7/24/08 at his Louis Gray blog.

My early attempts to understand this Twitter problem are in this FriendFeed micro-blog response to Louis' article.

(2) Aurelius Maximus wrote Twitter Just Pulled the Ace From Their Sleeve and Lit it on Fire Thu 7/24/08 at his Aurelius Maximus blog.

(3) Svetlana Gladkova wrote So You Thought Nothing Could Be Worse Than Fail Whale? Now Get Your Followers Back Thu 7/24/08 at her Profy blog.

(4) GeekMommy wrote I'm not a spammer, I've got a 1-to-1 ratio, Let me Follow People Back Please!!! Mon 7/22/08 at the Twitter Customer Support line.

(5) Jennifer Leggio wrote Twitter anti-spam efforts go overboard Mon 7/22/08 at the ZDNet blog.

(6) Sarah Perez theorized that the problems was initially an anti-SPAM-bot gone wild at New Twitter Anti-Spam Bot Causes Chaos on Thu 7/24/08 at the Read Write Web blog, but it turned out to be a database failure problem mixed on top of the anti-SPAM problems.

(7) Mark Davidson calls it The Great Twitter Follower Crash of 2008! Wed 7/23/08 at his Twitter Stars blog.

(8) Harrison Hoffman wrote The case of Twitter's missing followers Thu 7/24/08 at CNet News.

(9) Dan Kaplan wrote One day later, Twitter still fumbling footballs at the Super Bowl Thu 7/24/08 at Venture Beat and mentions the additonal problem of phantom Twitter posts which Louis Gray and Susan Beebe experienced.

(10) Susan Beebe wrote Twitter sending unauthorized tweets via my account! (Possible twitter data corruption issues?) [FriendFeed private feed - 7/24/08] This post won't be viewable unless you have access to her private feed at FriendFeed.

- Mitchell Tsai - CEO, Spiritual Business Companions : FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tribe.Net