On 25 Jan 2010, Twitter Support Team confirmed that some Twitter users had experienced an approximately three-fold increase in their Tweet Count; i.e. the number of 140 character posts they have submitted to Twitter.

As it happens, I myself am an Inflated Tweet Count Syndrome sufferer. I think my tweet count went from 3600-ish to 9600-ish overnight. To be honest, I don’t give two (or six) hoots about the numbers, but there are many on Twitter who are much more numbers-obsessed than me, so it’s an issue that’s causing ripples of irritation across the Twitter user-base.

Many users do keep an eye on their tweet count and treat milestone tweets as special events. Honourable mention here is due to the example of @mcawilliams who raised money for Haiti in the run-up to his 50,000th tweet. He invited a representative from Irish charity GOAL to post tweet no. 50,000 on his behalf. I note that John’s tweet count has now also succumbed to the hyper-inflation that’s going round…either that or he has passed milestones 100,000 and 150,000 in superhuman time.

The thing that irks me about this whole thing isn’t the faulty counts themselves but the low-priority status Twitter are giving to the problem:

UPDATE: 02/02/10 – This bug is a low priority issue because it does not prevent users from fully using Twitter. We do not expect to have this issue fixed in the immediate future for this reason. Please leave a comment below if you are affected by this issue. Thank you!

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In my spotlight this week is a song about weather and intimacy. It’s a song where my soul gets bared a wee bit, so if you’re squeamish or lacking the voyeuristic tendency most of us have, you’d best look away now. It’s complex in its simplicity or maybe it’s simple in it’s complexity, but we thought it would rain all day.

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On Sundays I like to pick one of my songs and write a little bit of background about it. It feels like a month of Sundays since the last one – the Sunday Spotlight took a break over Christmas and New Year. It returns this week with a song I wrote in 2004: Everybody Has Their Part To Play.

Lyrics | Studio recording, 2005	Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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This week the spotlight is one of the more introspective songs from my Edinburgh student days (like Don’t Fall Again). Back in 1986 I was living at 10 Brougham Place, Tollcross – I was a student of Computer Science & Electronics and shared a flat with two medical students and an arts student. This healthy cross-faculty mix was certainly a factor in the four of us getting on so well over those 2-3 years. But I was definitely the geek of the group and often struggled to keep up with some of the more philosophical discussions that took place.

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Speak My Mind was my way of expressing the frustration I felt at not being able to adequately express myself. The theme of the Irish paradox, wounded land and magical paradise, comes from the discussions I had with “closest friend” Linda (the arts student). At the time she was adamant that she wouldn’t visit Ireland because of “the Troubles”. I was relieved when these views mellowed some years later and she was happy to come on holiday through Ulster and Connacht.

Thanks to a conversation on Twitter earlier today with @thegurrier, I now feel the urge to express (in more than 140 characters) why I think that Twitter’s “new retweet” feature is A Good Thing™ on the whole. As a Tweetdeck user I was pleased to see it implemented so quickly and it is interesting to see that the new feature is being adopted by many users from what I can see in my own timeline. Posting a Retweet has been integrated into Tweetdeck very tidily, but a huge amount of confusion remains about how the new-style retweets are appearing (or not) in our twitter feeds regardless of client. Read more…

This is a slight departure on my usual Sunday Spotlight as, this week, I feature another songwriter’s song. In The City is the work of my good friend Nigel Coleman, a singer-songwriter from Co. Tipperary. From the moment I first heard this song, I loved the atmosphere and images it conjured up in my head. I tagged it on at the end of my recording time during the day I spent at Shay’s Studio in 2005 – a quickie cover to see what it might sound like. You can listen to this interpretation below alongside Nigel’s own recording which appeared on his Highway to the Sky EP in 2004.

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