Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or GTalk probably know by now that Friday afternoon I lost all of my Twitter followers and everyone I was following. For those of you who didn’t know, let me fill you in:

Mid afternoon on Friday I noticed that I had gone tweetless for quite some time. Upon further investigation I discovered that my follower and following number were both set at 0; a scary realization for someone who had nearly 650 followers and was following over 800 tweeple. After navigating through the terrible, terrible, support system used by Twitter I finally figured out how to report my concern via commenting on the “known issue”. After my post and a number of other user posts Twitter admitted there was a problem and at 3:00 pm PST and advised users that they had a fix and it would be resolved today.

It is now 8:32pm PST and my account, and from what I can tell in the Twitter support thread, a number of other accounts are still without any followers and are unable to follow anyone. That’s over 72 hours without a resolve, which has left me crippled in terms of spreading blog posts, information, and interacting with fellow twitter users.

Earlier this morning I had a brief discussion with some of my fellow SEO Dojo members about the issue, and one member in particular, Justin Parks, made an interesting comment; “I don’t think anyone should complain, free is free after all.”. It got me thinking; in one hand he was right. I pay absolutely nothing to help keep Twitter afloat, what right do I have to complain that it has been nearly 72 hours and I’ve been without service. On the other hand, Twitter provides a service to the public. Free or not I feel it is in some way their obligation to try and support their customer base as much as possible; if not for the users alone, at least out of good business sense.

Since my post in the thread Friday afternoon at least 30 other twitter users have complained of the same problem I am experiencing, and no further updates regarding an ETA or status of the issue have been made by Twitter their post on Friday.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think free services like Twitter have an obligation to support their customers better than they are currently, or is Justin correct in the sense that if we aren’t paying for it we should just deal? Let me know what you think in the poll below. I may be doing a follow up post once service is restored and I’ll use the data collected.

Last week I caught a good read over at the Huomah SEO Blog called, A small business guide local web marketing.  Author Charles Stankovitch did a thorough job of teaching readers how to tap into the local market on sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yelp, as well as a handful of other local sites.  But the irony of the situation was that shortly after the post went live, Google had gone in and made some new changes to the local interface.  Charles quickly commented on his post alerting readers of the changes, as well as some other current findings, but I thought I’d take a moment to outline some of the changes in regards to editing live business listings in Google Maps.

Above is a typical Google Maps business listing as it would appear in any typical business search. To most it probably looks no different than the listings looked prior to the change, but if you look a little closer you’ll notice below the business name that it says “Edited”, meaning that someone has made changes to this business listing.  You’ll also notice that at the bottom of the listing it tells you when the listing was last edited and gives you the option to view the original listing.  These changes seem to be merely aesthetic to give insight into some of the new internal features, since I really don’t see how they add any additional value to the average searcher other than to say, “Hey something’s changes, this may or may not be reliable”.

The major changes come in once you click on edit.  In the past clicking on edit would give you one of two options.  You could either claim the listing or it would tell you to login to make changes to the listing.  There really wasn’t any true editing option.  But with the introduction of what Google is calling “community edits” you can now make a number of adjustments to a business listing, so long as it isn’t already claimed by the business.

Move Marker

Move marker is pretty self explanatory.  It allows you to change the location marker of the specific listing.  If you feel that Google’s marker placement just isn’t quite accurate enough for your liking, you as a Google Maps user can go in and adjust it’s placement.  These changes are instantaneous assuming you didn’t move the marker more than 200 meters.  The great thing about this feature is if the business is in a large building with multiple offices or entrances, you can click and drag the markers to the specific entrance or location associated with the business listing.

Edit Details

This new feature allows you to instantaneously edit any details about a business on the fly.  Signed in or signed out Google maps users can change the name, physical address, phone number, website, and type of business all from within the Google Maps window.  The plus side to this of course is that if you are loyal to a business and wish to help them out a bit if they haven’t claimed their listing you can make sure they are being properly represented on Google Maps.  That bad thing about this is that people can maliciously change your information with a single click of a mouse.  Imagine having your competition change your company website to theirs or changing and removing information to make it harder for potential customers to contact you.  It’s not clear if Google has safeguards in affect to prevent this, but it’s definitely something to consider and one more reason why you should make a point of claiming your business listing in Google Local and the other local platforms.

View History

Are you finally getting around to claiming your business listing and you’re curious to know what people have done to your listing up until this point?  Google is now letting you see the details about your listings history, including when it was changed, where markers were moved from, and even who edited the listing.  The last part I found to be the most interesting and made me wonder if there was some way to opt out of this aspect of the new “community edits”.  For instance I made an adjustment to a listing just for the sake of this post and then reverted the listing back to it’s original state and would rather Google not display my information.  At this point it doesn’t appear to be showing my information, and the only Google profile listed is for the person who last moved the marker.  At this point I am uncertain as to whether or not Google will display your information for ALL local edits or just users who have changed a marker.

Overall I think the changes are minor in terms of impact for users who have already claimed their listings.  The only new golden feature provided to Local Business Center users is the opportunity to link to your business coupons.  Businesses who haven’t claimed their listings on the other hand have a lot more here to consider.  If you haven’t claimed your listing you are leaving yourself open to tampering or adjustments that could impact how potential customers may find you not only on the web, but in terms of physical location.

So this afternoon shortly before 2pm I noticed that my Twitterfox app went silent.  No new messages in, but it wasn’t showing up red like it would if twitter were down.  Curious as to why Twitter was so quiet I visited Twitter.com to login to my page to see if perhaps there was an issue with twitter.com.  I logged in fine, but what I found was a bit startling, the nearly 800 people I was following were gone.  Also the 600+ people who were following me were also gone.

After navigating Twitter’s troublesome support section I finally figured out how to “contact support”, which is basically nothing more than commenting on a thread regarding an issue they’ve had in the past.  At the time Twitter announced that it was a known issue.  I was hopefully that perhaps being a known issue it would be restored soon.  However, the updated posted about an hour later wasn’t very promising.

Turns out that Twitter users who are experiencing the zero followers and zero following problem our out of luck until Monday.  Twitter updated the issue at 3:00PM PST with the following, “We have a fix in for this but it won’t be released until Monday.  Please continue to leave comments below if you’re experiencing this.”  So needless to say I will be away from Twitter over the weekend unless this is resolved sooner.  For any other Twitter users who may be experiencing this you can visit the Twitter Follow Counts Are Zero and Cannot be Folow Or Be Followed known issue thread to leave comments about what you are experiencing.