For those of you trying out my price-watching service, BuyLater, and especially for those of you using the SMS-messaging feature of twitter – I’m very sorry.
I’ve been trying to get this new feature online over the past two days – let users elect to watch just Amazon-supplied price changes, rather than all vendors. This is handy because, when combined with free shipping, Amazon is often cheaper overall – even when they have a higher price.
So I thought I had it working, by about 1 am last night. Pushed it into production, and let it rip.
Ooops.
Every. Single. Item. In the database. Began sending announcements of “Initial Price: $X” to every user.
I caught it, of course – after about 60 seconds. Which was enough time to send announcements for the first 600 items or so.
If you got one in an email, you can probably safely discard it. If your cell phone woke you up in the middle of the night with a text message (yes, I’ve already got a few bug reports about that) – what can I say? I promise I won’t do it again.
