Few users seem to have noticed this, but apparently Twitter is no longer appending the correct application that was used to update user streams at the end of each message. Everything is marked as coming “from web”, even if the message was actually sent out from a desktop client, third-party web or mobile application.
Here’s the kicker: after some digging, I found that the company has learned about this issue a couple of days ago but decided not to fix it in order not to disturb the engineers during the weekend:
“With all the recent increase in Twitter API developers and ease of registering an OAuth application, we’re seeing a large growth in the source parameter database. The logic that appends source parameters to updates caches all of the source names in one large object. This object recently surpassed 1MB which is interesting because it is the largest size of an object that fits in memcached. The lack of ability to cache this object was causing an enormous hit on the database degrading performance.
The quick solution was to disable source parameters so that engineers didn’t need to give up their weekend. This will be fixed as soon as possible, likely early in June 1 workday.”
Guess they’re having a long weekend.
Meanwhile, I’m wondering how this will affect the ranking of ‘most popular Twitter clients’ and the likes.
(Hat tip to Chris Cosentino)