Weatherstem is Having Twitter Issues

I was introduced to Twitter way back in early 2007 at an Adobe Developers Conference in San Francisco.

I've made a lot of faulty predictions in my life, but I was immediately intrigued by Twitter and felt instinctively it would grow to become something huge. This is one prediction I did get right.

From the very moment I started coming up with the idea for Weatherstem in 2014, an integration with the Twitter platform I had been introduced to many years prior was something I considered indispensable.

The mechanism we've created is that each time we launch one of our Weatherstem units (comprised of a weather station and at least one cloud camera), it gets its own dedicated Twitter page (and Facebook page as well).

These pages are then updated throughout the day with useful weather updates, alerts, summaries and even weather and climate educational content.

Some of these pages are followed by thousands of people (for instance @FSUWeatherstem) and the feedback we've received has been overwhelmingly positive. These pages have been deployed at such sites as Penn State University and the University of Florida.

Some of these pages played very meaningful roles in each of the last several hurricanes that have impacted the United States by providing an alternative means of disseminating critical information to impacted communities via emergency management and law enforcement personnel.

Personally, I greatly respect and admire Twitter from a technological innovation standpoint, as well as the impact they've made on our World.

I further recognize the enormous responsibility they're encumbered by to protect their users privacy and security.

In order to do what we do (i.e. automating updates to Weatherstem Twitter pages), we had to create a Twitter app that is subject to a Twitter review process.

There are also a number of technical steps involved in minimizing the chances of unintended and/or malicious usage of a Twitter app.

In total there are thousands of hours of study and work that have gone into our leveraging Twitter's innovative platform to transmit useful weather information to community-focused Twitter pages.

At present, hundreds of the Weatherstem Twitter pages we manage are in a state of suspended access.

We can log into the account, but we are immediately taken through a series of steps where we need to validate the phone number associated with the account and in many cases, we are not even in control of the phone numbers that were used to create the accounts and in many other cases do not even recall associating a phone number with the accounts in question.

Multiple members of our team have spent countless hours attempting to reach out to Twitter via established support protocols with no success.

In my 10+ years developing software that integrates with Twitter, I have occasionally had issues like the one I describe here, but nothing that has persisted this long or been this disruptive.

We apologize for the issues that have been created here and are working as diligently as possible to restore the proper operation of what we consider to be a very innovative and valuable component of Weatherstem which is social integration with Twitter.

It is my hopes that this message is able to reach someone at Twitter and they will reach out to me at ed@weatherstem.com and offer their assistance to us as we have not been successful getting any assistance via Twitter's established, documented channels of support.

Without the establishment of reliable support from Twitter for our integrations, we may be forced to discontinue Weatherstem's integration with their platform which would truly be a shame for us and the communities we serve.