The end of an affair?

My Twitter experience has been frustrating to say the least. I signed up to Twitter last Thursday, the day I wrote this post explaining how I thought Twitter would be a great way to keep you all informed of my progress as I walk the Tokaido.

I started by choosing the username "thewalkingfool". I then went to upload a photo to my account page (the same fetching photo of me wearing the red clown nose which graces this blog), but despite numerous attempts I couldn't get it to upload. Thinking there may have been a problem with the photo size or format, I resized and reformatted it numerous times, but to no avail.

Eventually I waded through the FAQs and found mention of problems with certain browsers. I'd been using Firefox, so I switched to Safari, and hey presto, the photo uploaded and appeared on my Twitter home page. Problem was there was no sign of it on my account page, the page you all see when you go to check out my messages. I also typed a test message. This also failed to appear on my account page. Frustrated, I called it a day.

The next morning I went to what until the day before had been my account page at http://twitter.com/thewalkingfool in the hope that things had fixed themselves overnight. Not only was there no photo and no message, but there was no Walking Fool name. Instead the page seemed to have been taken over by someone called Anders Kulmbak. I then tried to sign in, only to be told I had the wrong username and password combination. I tried several times. Same result. Things were not looking good.

On Friday evening I sent off an email to the Twitter support people explaining what had happened. I still haven't received a reply. However, since Saturday I've been able to log in and use my account normally. If you go to my account page you should be able to see my photo and my first test mail. I still have no idea what happened. Was my account hacked, or was there some kind of bug in the works? Whichever the case, it doesn’t say much for the security and reliability of Twitter. Chances are I won’t be using it when I walk the Tokaido. Instead I'll probably use Blogger, which also offers the ability to update on the go via email. I'll keep you posted.

Distance walked today: 3km
Total distance walked since Tokaido training began: 231.1km
Days left until departure: 20