Twitter resolves Timeline delivery issue

Twitter has resumed services after an outage lasting a little over an hour, which saw problems with the home feed.

As TechCrunch noted, “You could tweet earlier. You could go to people’s profiles and see their latest tweet. You can even tweet that Twitter was down. Only some people could see that tweet… if they searched for it.”

This was because the home feed was updating either really slowly, or in the case of some users not at all. As noted by TheNextWeb, “Users can send tweets to the service, but they’re coming in for other’s very slowly”.

The problem extended to all versions of Twitter – on the desktop version, mobile apps, Tweetdeck, web app and other API clients.

In a status update Twitter said it was aware of the problem, noting “We are currently experience an issue with tweeting and a delay in timelines. Our engineers are currently working on this issue.”

It updated this a few moments ago to say that the issue had been fully resolved and apologizing for the inconvenience.

The DownRightNow website has also confirmed that the site is back up and running following the service disruption.

The outage had predictably created ripples of panic across the Internet.

It is not immediately clear what caused the outage and how many users were affected, but it looks as though it was not limited to a single geography, because Twitter India experienced similar problems. Twitter has not yet elaborated on the reasons for the disruption.

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Twitter’s ‘While You Were Away’ begins rolling out to some users: report

Twitter recently rolled out a new feature which allows users to have a quick glance at some of the tweets they may have missed since their last login. The ‘While you were away’ feature essentially shows the best tweets on top of your homepage when you open the app or the website.

Now sites like The Verge, Guardian and TechCrunch are reporting that the feature is live for some.  We are yet to see the feature on any of our feeds.

‘While you were away’ focuses on giving the user a recap of some of the tweets which they could have missed in a timeline filled with hundreds of tweets.   It is not clear on how Twitter chooses these top tweets but it could be dependent on the number of retweets or favourites it has received or the kind of engagement a tweet has seen from other users.

“Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great,” Twitter had said when it announced the new feature in November. This feature is also similar to Facebook’s ‘Top Stories’ feature which gives the user a recap of some of the major stories that have taken place on a particular day.

Essentially this feature is Twitter’s way of ensuring that users get a simplified sense of what were the key tweets, discussions on the site, instead of getting inundated with a lot of irrelevant stuff. For Twitter, this feature is a must-have given that the social media site has seen user engagement and growth fall in the last quarter.  Whether it will boost engagement remains to be seen and that can only be gauged once the global roll-out takes place.

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Tweets may help improve urban planning

Geo-localised tweets can be a very useful source of information for urban planning and land use, a new study has found.

Researchers have already done it in Manhattan, Madrid and London and have been able to identify, for example, nightlife areas of these large cities.

Every day millions of citizens around the world generate massive amounts of geolocalised content using mobile applications and social networks.

Especially on Twitter, which could become a sensor of interactions between people and their environment and provide guidelines for planning life in the city.

A forgotten issue in urbanism is land use during the night time, with problems such as noise and dirt, which could be improved with this type of tool.

Enrique and Vanessa Frias-Martinez, researchers at Telefonica Research in Madrid and the University of Maryland (US) respectively, have suggested using geolocalised tweets for urban planning and land use.

“Geolocalised tweets can be a very useful source of information for planning, since it is an activity carried out by a large number of people who provide information on where they are at a specific time and what they are doing,” Enrique said.

The researcher points out that “thanks to the increased use of smartphones, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to access and produce information ubiquitously.”

These networks, he added, generate tags with the event’s geolocation.

“For example, Twitter includes longitude-latitude information in the tweet if the user so desires. Amongst possible applications we have seen that this network could be

highly suited to helping in urban planning, especially in identifying land use,” researchers said.

Using Twitter, “you can capture information on urban land use more efficiently and for a much larger number of people than with questionnaires,” said Enrique.

The new technique “automatically determines land uses in urban areas by grouping together geographical regions with similar patterns of Twitter activity,” researchers said.

Using aggregate activity of tweets, the researchers have studied land use in Manhattan, Madrid and London.

In the first two cases they identified four uses: residential, business, daytime leisure (mainly parks and tourist areas) and nightlife areas. In London, they also

established industrial land uses. These results were validated with open data sources.

The study was published in the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

PTI

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