There are lots of complaints about Twitter but I think we have to remember that this is a free service. While they are getting funding it isn’t coming from you or me. I think we need to cut them a little slack.

If twitter’s own help system is to be believed, no one from twitter has looked at my ticket since January.

Twitter appears to have a problem with long usernames. My guess is that part of the system has a limit, but the part which lets you register doesn’t enforce the limit. So you end up creating an account which you can use as long as you stay logged in, but if you log out, or log in via another twitter client, you can’t because now you’re hitting the part of the system which DOES enforce the username length.

When I try to reset the password for the account, the twitter system accepts both the userid and registered email, but no email ever appears.

Honestly, they should shut down their support system at this point, they don’t respond to it. Far better to set the correct level of expectations (no support) than deceive people into thinking that they’ll get a response if they open a ticket.

But who exactly are twitter’s customers?

Are you? How much did you pay to use twitter?

Those that pay, are customers. Those that do not, are just users of a free service.

AVG Antivirus comes in 2 flavors: paid & free.

Grisoft considers those that pay their customers and will provide good customer service to them, through email, answered by actual Grisoft employees.

Those that use the free version are just users and are told if they have any problems or issues to go to the user2user support forum and help each other figure it out. You can’t even report a bug or false positive unless you pay them first. That forum isn’t monitored by any employees of Grisoft, it’s strictly volunteers.

You should be happy that twitter doesn’t work like a lot of other free services and they didn’t just email you a link to a forum full of other confused twitter users, to answer your questions.

Unless you paid them for your twitter account, as L-eWolf said, cut them some slack.

As for the length issue you noted in your followup comment, I use @LoneWolfMuskoka which is longer than @cloudcontacts and haven’t run into any problems like you are describing. It could possibly be that 13 characters is somehow hokey, but I doubt that — it doesn’t seem like an edge case.

I wonder if you may have put some non-printable or white space characters into the original account name when you signed up. Some parts of the system may match the name while others don’t. It may also be possible that the character encoding could have been screwed up somewhere and some of the servers handle it and others don’t. That might explain why refreshing a random number of times gets you logged in.

Anyway, I’m just guessing at what the problem might be and the point is moot since I can’t do anything about it anyway. I hope that the issue gets sorted out for you soon.

If twitter do not want to or cannot provide support to free users, fine, remove the support link, direct people to GetSatisfaction or elsewhere. But by providing and encouraging people to file requests through the ZenDesk site they are tacitly if not explicitly saying that they have some sort of support process, just not one that mere mortals understand.

And as far as free goes: many people are providing value back to twitter by developing tools atop the twitter API. Developers get marginally better support for development issues, but only marginally. Where’s the value in return?

One who consumes goods and services

always take care of your house first

today i will try contacting their investors to get their take.

It’s a free service that was successful because of people like you and me, LoneWolf. Twitter shouldn’t forget about us.

I had a ticket open for 4 months before I received support, and once they did address it, they didn’t even address it to my satisfaction. (Allen, with regards to the comment below, a 2 month turnaround is lucky!) To make matters worse, apparently Twitter switched its customer support helpdesk two times since I submitted the ticket, so I had to keep resbmitting it. I learned that I should store a local copy of all my complaints since then.

These platforms are great to use, but we have to step back I guess and remember that they are also free, and so as they say, sometimes you “get what you pay for ” in terms of service I suppose.

I’ve changed my email with twitter to be a different user on the same domain and it works fine.

They need to have better customer service. that’s for sure.

I agree that they could hire more support people — but who will train them? The current support people who are already overwhelmed.

I agree that they should be more forth-coming in their communication with users who submit problems.

They didn’t plan for Twitter to become what it has. Hopefully they’ll be able to catch up to where they are soon.