Some Favorites Work, Some Utterly Do Not

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 20, 2008, 3:40:21 AM10/20/08

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I cannot favorite this tweet via either the web or API:

http://twitter.com/stshank/statuses/966975517

This is hardly alone. Some tweets, no problemo. Some tweets
fail to be favorited, seemingly no matter how many times I press
the little star icon or how many times I run the API to create
that favorite.

Oh, if I press the little star on the user's page, a yellow star
appears. But it is a LIE. If I refresh the page, the star is gone. So
there is a failure to persist the favorite status somewhere.

It is clearly not a problem just of this user; his updates are
not protected, and I have recently favorited another of his tweets
sucessfully:

http://twitter.com/stshank/statuses/964178102

But it may be a time-related problem of some sort. I may not
be able to favorite his tweets _at this time_. Interestingly, some
users I can star some of their tweets, but not others. For example:

http://twitter.com/Joanmarie/statuses/966930885 (CAN)
http://twitter.com/Joanmarie/statuses/966807634 (CANNOT)

Looking for any advice or pointers to information on why this
may be happening, and what I can do to work around it.

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 20, 2008, 9:27:53 AM10/20/08

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Well, it's clear that the problem with favoriting isn't just
that Twitter doesn't like some users. I can't favorite this
one either:

http://twitter.com/al3x/statuses/967108203

Alex Payne

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Oct 20, 2008, 1:26:10 PM10/20/08

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What happens when you favorite them via the API and it doesn't take?

--
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 20, 2008, 3:05:11 PM10/20/08

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I'm sorry to say I didn't capture JSON returned in that "will not
favorite" case.

---

As an update, I've noticed that some tweets that were not favoriteable
before, now are.
Yours, for example, was subsequently correctly favorited via API:

http://twitter.com/al3x/statuses/967108203

Possibly related, the JSON API is now returning "favorited":false it
at least
some cases where it HAS created a favorite. For example. looking to
star
http://twitter.com/ttseco/statuses/967052986 I execute
http://twitter.com/favorites/create/967052986.json

it returns:

{"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"user":{"description":"I'm not a native
speaker and it snows.","url":"http:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/ttseco
\/","name":"Theo
Tsecouras","protected":false,"profile_image_url":"http:\/\/
s3.amazonaws.com\/twitter_production\/profile_images\/44289712\/
tweet_normal.jpg","screen_name":"ttseco","followers_count":
270,"location":"Athens, Greece","id":
12217652},"favorited":false,"in_reply_to_user_id":null,"truncated":false,"id":
967052986,"source":"web","created_at":"Mon Oct 20 05:18:03 +0000
2008","text":"I don't think there's anyone in the world who likes to
eat Japanese more than I do except, maybe, Godzilla."}

But is in fact favorited and is returned that way from the web
interface.

So the earlier not favoriting (via API or Web) followed by now
favoriting some things that it indicates it didn't favorite suggests
that there's still something out of balance.

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 20, 2008, 3:40:34 PM10/20/08

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Ok, here is one that currently does not work:

I cannot favorite http://twitter.com/avflox/statuses/966946695
via Web, nor via JSON API. Call used:

http://twitter.com/favorites/create/966946695.json

JSON returned:

{"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"user":{"description":"Pit your Chi
against my Wu Li, baby.","url":"http:\/\/omgomgomfg.com
\/","name":"A.V. Flox","protected":false,"profile_image_url":"http:\/\/
s3.amazonaws.com\/twitter_production\/profile_images\/58910678\/
yellow_normal.jpg","screen_name":"avflox","followers_count":
654,"location":"California, USA","id":
5845242},"favorited":false,"in_reply_to_user_id":null,"truncated":false,"id":
966946695,"source":"web","created_at":"Mon Oct 20 03:17:11 +0000
2008","text":"HE: like a sheep. ME: that's right darling, let me hear
it. Mehh. HE: mehh. ME: very good, one more time. Mehhhhh. HE:
mehhhhhhhh."}

This is also a good example of one that looks like I have stared the
tweet via
the user's page (http://twitter.com/avflox) yet the stars disappear
when the
page refreshes. On the specific tweet page (http://twitter.com/avflox/
statuses/966946695)
the AJAX for favoriting just appears to time out and fail.

Alex Payne

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Oct 20, 2008, 9:03:13 PM10/20/08

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Thanks for the example. We'll investigate.

--

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 21, 2008, 12:32:41 PM10/21/08

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There appears to be some "favorites are broken" discussion in the user
forums as well:

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/favorites_not_appearing_in_the_right_date_time_chronological_order_bug_some_pages_blank

And further work suggests that timing is playing some to a large role
here. Many of the items that could not be favorited 12-24 hours ago
were successfully favorited just now. I have seen that delay several
times in the last week. Eventually things that could not be favorited
become favorite-able again. Most users would have long since moved on
by then, however.

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 21, 2008, 7:54:43 PM10/21/08

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Alex Payne

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Oct 21, 2008, 8:00:39 PM10/21/08

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Thanks for the examples!

--

Geoff Barnes

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Oct 21, 2008, 8:03:21 PM10/21/08

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I'm @texburgher of that exchange. My joke tweet about it aside, there have been apparent inconsistencies with favouriting of tweets over the past week to two weeks (that I've seen). If you are interested at any point in my description of the symptoms, I'm happy to give it. Let me know.

Best,
Geoff

--
Geoff Barnes
@texburgher

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 22, 2008, 9:06:25 AM10/22/08

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Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 23, 2008, 5:24:19 PM10/23/08

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Alex Payne

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Oct 23, 2008, 5:46:23 PM10/23/08

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Thanks. We've got someone looking into it but we've had a hard time
replicating. Hopefully this'll help.

--

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 23, 2008, 6:23:58 PM10/23/08

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If you want detailed request/response logs of requests and results,
I can generate and provide. I'll put them on a real-time feed if you
like. Just let me know what kind of data you want. Feel free to put
your assigned tech in touch with me. I'll do whatever I can to help
you
fix this problem.

jse

Alex Payne

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Oct 23, 2008, 6:32:02 PM10/23/08

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We found the bug. You were hitting the limit of the number of
favorites a user can create per day. We simply weren't exposing the
error message. We'll start doing so, and perhaps we need to up the
favorites per day limit as well.

--

Geoff Barnes

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Oct 23, 2008, 6:37:38 PM10/23/08

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Yes, if favorites are to be worth any more to twitter users than bookmarks, we can't be hitting that limit so easily.

Alex, what is the limit, anyways?

--
Geoff Barnes
@texburgher

Alex Payne

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Oct 23, 2008, 6:44:54 PM10/23/08

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It's currently 250 favorites per day. That seemed like a healthy
number to us...

Geoff Barnes

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Oct 23, 2008, 6:50:58 PM10/23/08

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...and then there was favrd. :)

250 might have been a very reasonable limit given contemporaneous projections regarding likely use of the method. But every feature exposed by the API will end up being used in unpredictable ways. 6 months ago, I used favorites like bookmarks. Now I use them as votes to be tallied by the favrd site for a community built using twitter as a foundation.

You guys gave birth and raised a great system and environment, and life has grown therein.

--
Geoff Barnes
@texburgher

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 23, 2008, 7:18:04 PM10/23/08

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That makes some sense. I use the favorites for both bookmarks (for the
majority of users who aren't on Favrd), and as votes for Favrd (for
the few that are). I could easily be cresting 250/day. Btw, I assure
you I am not mechanically issuing favorites; every one of them is
lovingly applied by my hand.

A better error message would help. Expanding the limit would help even
more.

Given that I follow just over 650 users, which in aggregate issue
1,500-4,500 tweets/day, allowing "just" 250 favorites a day seems a
very low number. I am sure I'm on the high end of readership, but I
have seen a number of my colleagues who follow 400+ users. Some follow
1,000.

Is there a reason to limit favorites thus? I.e. is it an "expensive
operation"? I wouldn't think so, but it could be. If not, why not
increase the number of allowed favorites to 1,000 or 1,500/day, say?

Alex Payne

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Oct 23, 2008, 7:21:16 PM10/23/08

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We'll bump it to 1000.

--

Geoff Barnes

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Oct 23, 2008, 7:23:18 PM10/23/08

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AL3X ADORED AS USALLY. (star this, mkay? I need it for the MISSY_BOO meme ;))

--
Geoff Barnes
@texburgher

Jonathan Eunice

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Oct 28, 2008, 6:22:09 PM10/28/08

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I have personally seen no further problems with favoriting since the
favorite limit bump.

I have heard one user (@Tony_D) comment about "stars not sticking" in
the last few days, but nothing like the many users complaining prior
to
the favorite limit bump.

I believe the limit bump did the job, and that this issue is fixed.

Thanks Alex and Twitter crew!

OK

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Nov 5, 2008, 1:38:24 PM11/5/08

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Alex, I have had a problem with favorites since Oct. 13. I opened a
Twitter Support ticket and it has gone unheeded.

My problem is that my favorites appear out of date/time order.

It is a hard problem at first to spot, until you do the following.

Please check them by looking at:

1. Top of page 1, then bottom of page 1
2. Top of page 2, then bottom of page 2
3. Top of page 3, then bottom of page 3
4. Top of page 4, then bottom of page 4
etc.

You will see that they are not in chronological order (per the time/
date they were tweeted).

I noticed some other users' tweets which were also not in date/time
order.

Please let me know what info you need to look into this.

http://twitter.com/badkitty_

On Oct 20, 12:26 pm, "Alex Payne" <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
> What happens when you favorite them via the API and it doesn't take?
>
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 6:27 AM, Jonathan Eunice
>

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