Twitter Inconsistency You may have seen a similar scene when you visit Wal-mart or bestbuy, also known to many as worst buy, at their TV section. Let us imagine, if we put tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of TV sets in the same room and tune them all to the same channel, what do we expect to see? We should see all the screens showing exactly the same things. If one screen shows a crying baby, we reasonably expect all the other screens also show the same crying baby. Web users have the same expectation for the web applications. Imagine all the TV screens are turned into web browser windows, and they all visit the same website, we expect they all see the same thing. This is the consistency we are talking about today. Consistency is a fundamental expectation from a web user, and it’s the foundation for a lot of web activities. For example, I forward a link of a crying baby web page to a friend, I reasonably expect, if the web page hasn’t changed, my friend should also see the same crying baby instead of a snarling buffoon. This is also the foundation of crawler based web archiving, that I can simply record and preserve programs from one single TV set out of the millions and reasonably expect all my fellow citizens should have seen the same thing, therefore the collective memory.

Inconsistency is by design, and not limited to Twitter “Eventually consistent”: older inconsistency will eventually reconcile, but new inconsistency keeps coming in Can be much more severe than expected “Archiving the Relaxed Consistency Web”, CIKM 2014 Needs further investigation and profiling Needs new tools to reconcile inconsistency