The Standard received a lot of flack for assigning Twitter to the "fail" category in our special feature, "10 'Net services that will succeed (and 10 that will probably fail)." The reasons related to Twitter's business model and lack of mainstream appeal.
Add another problem to the list: The service is experiencing more site downtime and user-facing bugs. The latest failure has been noted by many anguished Twitterers, including VentureBeat writer and blogger MG Siegler and Mashable, but the latest breakdown seems to go beyond a "service unavailable" page. When I attempted to log on this morning, I received a "save to disk" prompt, which asked me to open or save "parislemon.json":
Bizarre. ParisLemon happens to be the name of Siegler's blog. However, the prompt I received occured after hitting the "sign in" button on twitter.com/login page. It is a JavaScript Object Notation file. Twitter does use JavaScript extensively, but there was no other information about the specific file on Google or in the HTML source of the Twitter login page, although it does show up in the ParisLemon HTML source. I didn't download it -- unwarranted pop-up "save to disk" prompts are often employed by marginal porn sites and other baddies to install adware and spyware -- and now I can't get the prompt back.
Did anyone experience the same behavior, or try examining the .json file? Comment below or email me at ian at thestandard dot com. Or, twitter me at twitter.com/ilamont -- if you can get the service to work.
Ian Lamont is the author of The Social Enterprise blog on TheStandard.com. Comment below, or email Ian at ian@thestandard.com. Follow Ian's updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ilamont, or visit his personal blog. Ian's bio and disclosures are located here.
Comments
I would try logging out of Twitter to see what happens when log back in, but I doubt that Twitter would ever even let me log back in. I'm their black eye. I have no idea what that means, but it is entertaining to me nonetheless. I miss my Twitter audience. From 2,044 to 0 :(
I have my own conspiracy theories on Twitter. I think that "they" are unhappy with some of the things that SOME of us "tweet" there. They have and promote an elitist behavior that is exclusionary. I'm sure there is a secret direct order that @acomputerpro shall not be followed.
That's my take on it. I'll try to get the .json file. If I do, I'll dissect it... and we'll find out the real story.
The truth is out there.
Agent G. J. "Fox" Mulder aka: http://www.twitter.com/acomputerpro
I am getting that same behavior.
Good job, Mulder, er, GJ. I am trying to remember if I visited parislemon before or after I attempted to login this morning. Regardless, note that the screenshot shows the download coming from twitter, not parislemon -- if Twitter is not hosting this file, that raises some security flags. I hope they look into it.
So I'm thinking... hmm... let me delve deeper into this conspiracy theory and align myself with the "Bad Team" even though no such color exists... except for orange and some shades of green.
I tried to follow my new friend Ian (hint hint) and got the following.
(This is where I would have embedded the picture, but I'm really bad with html tags.)
So I put the evidence over on Pownce: http://pownce.com/acomputerpro/
-gj (acomputerpro)
We've fixed this bug. Thanks for posting about it : )
Let us know if you have any other problems with this.
Britt Selvitelle
britt@twitter.com
http://twitter.com/bs
Wow: When blogs, twitter, and Flickr collide -- watch out!
Great research, GJ (other readers: Follow his Pownce link, which leads to Flickr, which shows the screenshot of my messed-up Twitter page).
Britt, thanks for looking into this -- it's a good customer service/development team that follows up quickly and informs users about what's going on. I do hope the .json issue was fixed, though -- if not, I would consider that to be a significant security issue.
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