For the past month or more my Twitter account has said I have two DMs which don't exist. We all know Twitter is running a number of different databases trying to keep things up to date. We all see how certain facets of the interface 'lag' from time to time. But to have such a serious error and to have no way to correct it is really bad software engineering.
Two ghost direct messages that don't exist is trivial under the circumstances. It's been a while since many of us have seen the big elephant with the proclamation 'Twitter is over capacity' but we get other messages instead - plain text ones stating we can't connect, that there is an error, that the servers can't handle the request, etc.
Twitter is a new service and its membership is still growing by leaps and bounds. The Twitter people recently received an injection of $100 million in new venture capital. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they invest some of this unseemly sum in sorely needed computer hardware.
But above and beyond that: these Twitter 'engineers' need to stop dimensioning their system for yesterday and start dimensioning it for tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And the day after that. That's the real world of software engineering. And the Twitter people seem abysmally inept at understanding that and woefully inexperienced with nontrivial software system projects.
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