I use small apps to connect my blog, twitter and facebook accounts together. (...as described previously.) So when I post something on twitter, also my facebook status gets updated with the same message.

This week the Facebook app called "Twitter" did a small change: It would still post my tweets to my Facebook wall, but not set my Facebook status to the same message. I don't know why someone made this change, and if there are some users that will think of it as an improvement. At least for myself, I had started to use Twitter as the primary way to update both my Facebook and Twitter statuses conveniently at the same time.

The last tweet that got updated properly, was from Tuesday. The first tweet that didn't was from Friday. I went to the Discussion pages for the Facebook app "Twitter" and 1) found out that other users had the same problem and 2) did not see any comment from the developers of the app (which should be Twitter itself). In the discussion I also found out that switching to another Facebook app called Smart Twitter would help.

So I switched to Smart Twitter and will now continue my life as usual.

I just wanted to shortly blog this, to illustrate how easy it is to lose users if 1) you make a small change without understanding what it means to your users habits 2) don't react to feedback within 24 hours and 3) there is a replacement readily available. This is what makes online services rather ruthless: If your site redesign is a failure, if your site becomes slow or unavailable... it is very easy to lose your users.

As they say: Easy come, easy go.