Earlier today we posted about an apparent meltdown by popular Twitter user @astrospace titled: “How to Destroy Your Twitter Brand in Minutes“. Since astrospace has since responded, we’re posting an update to that story.

1. Astrospace’s Response

Astrospace, now using the Twitter name @Astronautics, replied in the Mashable comments section:

In the space of 11 days, not including deleted/suspended/unrecorded incomplete unfollows etc being pruned from my account (when its cache was refreshed) like many others (I think @Scobleizer lost 600 followers this way), Twitter somehow managed to remove over 12000 of my friends/followers. After my cache was refreshed, I still had 28000 followers.

The @astrospace account is now in the hands of an unknown third party. I spoke to the FBI and others and the graphics and text which are copyright and are the intellectual property of Space and Astronautics News have now been removed from @astrospace. The only Twitter account I have is now called @astronautics. Apart from the mysteriously disappearing 4000 followers which Twitter bizarrely deleted in a flash, I only lost about 189 followers due to this incident. @astronautics currently has 23974 followers.”

In this response, @astronautics is essentially laying out a former dispute with Twitter staff: he makes no claim that the rant was not his.

2. Hacking Claims

“Astronautics” also posted the following to his new Twitter account, making an allegation of hacking:

3. Not a Hack: Blog Post Emerges

The hack claim fails to hold water when we find that astrospace, shortly after his outburst on Twitter, posted (then hastily deleted) the following on his blog. In it, he announces he is quitting Twitter. We found the deleted post in Google’s cache (it’s well known that Google caches virtually all web content for a period after it is posted):

More Serious Incompetence at Twitter - Why I left.

Space and Astronautics News is no longer on Twitter.com

This is due to poor security and serious incompetence at Twitter.

In the last three weeks, many Twitter accounts have been hacked, including those of President Obama and Britney Spears. This has been made possible by poor security at Twitter.

Twitter has demonstrated extreme technical incompetence. Last week, while rebuilding my cache, which became necessary when my control buttons stopped working, Twitter somehow managed to remove over 8000 people from my friends list. Since errors by Twitter also caused third party applications designed to notify users of Friends and Followers to stop working, I had to manually check to see if I had reciprocated 22000 follow requests from users, viewing 1091 pages individually.

I was very dilligent, always replied in a timely manner to their messages, and I cared for, listened to, and sometimes helped my followers. But the latest round of Twitter incompetence has broken the straw on the camel’s back.

Twitter rebuilt my cache again, this time without unfollowing anyone, and clearing out some deleted and suspended accounts, which amounted to ~0.58% of my followers.

Three days later, by which time my account was the 42nd most popular account on Twitter, with just under 28000 followers, suddenly 15% of my followers disappeared in a flash (not over a period of time).

I worked hard at this. Whatever I do, I do it while being very focused on it and determined. I had been aiming to be in the top 5 on Twitter by the end of February - and, gaining ~1000 new followers a day as I was - would probably have got there.

I know I could have done it. My 28000 followers know as well. My account was the fastest rising one in terms of followers on the whole of Twitter.

But I can no longer tolerate repeated incompetence of this magnitude.

Also, their customer service is almost non-existent. They completely ignore about 95% of all requests for assistance made to them, or reply months later, as I experienced.

Twitter is the most badly run and technically incompetent company I have ever seen, and I have been around and met some scum, believe you me, but this lot really take the biscuit. I hope that their ends will be as their actions deserve.

One point to note is that there is no policing of racist or pornographic accounts, no filtering of content or advisory notices whatever. Very many people on Twitter spout uninformed, racist, bigoted and disrespectful remarks and there is nothing to stop them.

It is no place to allow children to access.

Many people on Twitter spout treasonous remarks, are insolent about the President and disloyal to the country which shelters them and gives them protection. I do not want to be yoked with scum like that.

Also, it is my belief that Twitter lacks probity. When I deleted my account they posted messages on it which I had not authorised and were not my creation. I had to reinstate my account to prevent them from using it for this purpose.

Avoid Twitter like the antisocial plague and threat to privacy and security which it is. I sincerely hope that it is quickly shut down and its staff go back to cleaning toilets or something else more suited to their abilities.

Are we to believe that the mysterious hacker broke into both astrospace’s Twitter account AND his blog, posted the “meltdown” tweets (including tweets that promoted astrospace’s website and re-affirmed his strongly pro-Obama views), then politely deleted the post and killed the Twitter account?

4. Likely Series of Events

Putting the pieces together, then, it’s time to wrap this one up:

1. Motivated by a dispute with Twitter, @astrospace posted the Twitter “meltdown”

2. As mentioned in his blog post, he deleted his account

3. Spotting the username was available, an opportunist grabbed the @astrospace account on Twitter

4. Astrospace got his followers transferred to his new Astronautics account, and called the opportunist a “hacker”

Your Thoughts?

What are your thoughts on the incident? Let us know in the comments.

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Obama continues his web outreach today, announcing in his YouTube address that he will soon launch Recovery.gov, a site for tracking “how and where we spend taxpayer dollars”. Is this a new form of web-enabled transparency?

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Die-hard Twhirl fanatics (like me) can celebrate the start of the weekend with a fresh new update to the desktop Twitter app. Albeit just a preview release, Twhirl v.0.8.8f is here and includes a few extra gems for Twitter, Seesmic, and Ping.fm fans to make the most of the popular Adobe AIR desktop client.

The new release adds four additional goodies that might make users who still haven’t fallen for Twhirl’s biggest, and recently funded competitor, TweetDeck, rejoice. We think the new additions make Twhirl even more useful, all the while simple, fast, and less overwhelming than the other giant client.

So what’s new? In addition to being able to post to Ping.fm, Twhirl also now lets users record Seesmic videos and replies from the client, and also ensures that you won’t miss a single tweet mentioning your Twitter username. So instead of just getting replies that have @username at the beginning of the tweet, you’ll now receive all replies with your @username regardless of whether it’s at the beginning, middle, or end. Hooray!

The best new addition is the tracking capabilities made possible through enhanced search functionality. Now when you enter a query, you can click the “activate” button to create a new tab (there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of tabs) with results that match your search. You can also opt to receive notifications from Twhirl every time there’s a new tweet matching your query.

As described in Loic Le Meur’s blog post on the update, you can sign up starting today to receive the new release of the invitation-only multipurpose application. We can’t promise you’ll get the update right away, but I received the email with the download link almost immediately after submitting my name and confirming the follow-up email link. Happy Twhirling!

What do you think of the new Twhirl? And is it enough to challenge rival TweetDeck?

More Twitter Resources From Mashable

-Tweets to Go: 36+ More Twitter Resources for Your Phone

-FOLLOW FAIL: The top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter

-HOW TO: Quiet the Twitter Noise

-HOW NOT TO: Build Your Twitter Community

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–UPDATE: Please see our followup post - “Twitter Meltdown Not a Hack“–

What does a Twitter meltdown look like? Probably something like the above, in which the user @astrospace seemingly loses his cool and goes on the attack.

The dominant theory remains that the account holder, representing the space.gs website, simply flipped out. This Twitpic (above) captured the carnage. The account has now dropped from 23,000+ followers to 213.

We’re still piecing together, from Twitter searches, what was said when, but the theory of a meltdown seems the likely story at this time. The Applicant blog has more details on that opinion, having spotted the story on Thursday. Meanwhile, we discovered that the account owner posted this message on the brand feedback site GetSatisfaction, solidifying the story:

Twitter has not closed my account as I requested.

I have repeatedly requested closure of account “astrospace” yet no action has been taken. I do not have access to the user interface for this account and cannot retrieve its password to re-do the delete request proceedure. I requested closure of this account because of gross incompetence on the part of Twitter (the sudden deletion on two occasions of 12000 friends/followers). I need the account closed asap. If this is not actioned I will have to take the matter to the authorities - and believe me I will.

If you have more information - or you were following @astrospace when this happened - please leave a comment and we will update this post accordingly.

We’ll also be posting updates to twitter.com/mashable

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Ari Herzog (@ariherzog) is an online media strategist to business and government. He writes about social media and online marketing at ariwriter.com.

The Obama White House has a new website design and a first blog, a continuing weekly YouTube channel, and an updated Facebook page. But what will happen on Twitter? How should it be used?

Communication, Transparency and Participation: Falling Short

In recent months, the Obama campaign team attracted over 100,000 people to follow their tweeted links to press releases pushed through @BarackObama, such as the following from last October:

The official tweets from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue via @TheWhiteHouse appeared in a similar fashion:

White House director of new media Macon Phillips blogged about the Obama Administration offering change in the form of communication, transparency, and participation. I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider the above @BarackObama and @TheWhiteHouse screen shots representative of those three characteristics.

Twitter Politicians to Emulate

Thinking Obama could use some inspiration, here’s a snapshot of some Twitter feeds from other heads of state and governmental leaders around the world.

Driving some 500 miles from Washington to Ottawa, we meet Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (@PMHarper) who obviously has a staffer tweeting on his behalf about things he does, people he meets, and places he goes:

With varying degrees of frequency, Harper’s opposition leaders are also tweeting and engaging with citizenry, including Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton, Elizabeth May, Bob Rae, and Gilles Duceppe.

Across the pond, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown deserves special mention. He has a team that are responsible for similar new media initiatives as Obama, but Brown’s group on Twitter are responding to people more often than tweeting press releases. Here’s a snippet:

If you go to the page for @DowningStreet, you’ll see there are approximately 17,000 tweeps both following and being followed by the PM, including yours truly. I’m an American citizen living near Boston, but I’ve tweeted Brown’s team and they reply within hours, if not minutes. It’s remarkable and something Obama’s team should seriously consider emulating. (By contrast, @TheWhiteHouse is followed by about 17,000 but only follows seven.)

The United Kingdom also serves up a feed from the Parliament web team, using @UKParliament.

Elsewhere in Europe, I’ve verified with others that Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu (@CPTariceanu) and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (@Netanyahu) have official Twitter feeds, although written by aides. Here are their recent tweets:

Flying down under, Australia is also very much alive on Twitter, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd taking a similar tone as Brown, wherein replies are common.

And like in Canada, opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull tweets.

Finally, any list of twittering world leaders can’t be complete without a nod to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, whose team tweets short phrases of what the @SecGen is doing and who he meets with. There are no links and no replies, but it’s something.

US Politicians To Emulate on Twitter

Which brings us back to Obama. What should the leader of the free world do on Twitter?

For starters, President Obama could look within his administrative managers to Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration who routinely tweets from her office and on the go.

Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public democracy, is another recent twitterer who the President could follow:

In the legislative branch, Obama could look to Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas or Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, two of the early adopters of the micro-blogging service.

If nothing else, Obama could solicit the advice of his inaugural team who tweeted as @ObamaInaugural, pushing more information than press releases. When I pressed them for information, they did reply, albeit in private direct messages. I suppose a DM is better than nothing.

Your Advice for the President’s Team?

How about you? What’s your advice for Macon Phillips and the Obama new media team? Clearly he needs to adhere to the principles of communication, transparency and participation. But which of these leaders should he and his team emulate when communicating with us on Twitter? Or would a completely different format be more suited to the man at the top?

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