Wow… I had no idea people still remembered Twinkle. I was one of the engineers at Tapulous, back in the day, and worked briefly on Twinkle.
That service was actually a huge disaster for us. The users were mostly tweens, and we had a huge Chartroulette-esque problem with child porn, where users would expose themselves through the service. Our community management team is probably scarred for life. Our engineers also hated it, because its backend was horrendous and we had a lot of availability issues; the service would go down constantly.
The very last thing I did at Tapulous / Disney (on my last day) was kill off Twinkle, shutting down the servers. Everybody was quite happy to see it gone.
That service was actually a huge disaster for us. The users were mostly tweens, and we had a huge Chartroulette-esque problem with child porn, where users would expose themselves through the service. Our community management team is probably scarred for life. Our engineers also hated it, because its backend was horrendous and we had a lot of availability issues; the service would go down constantly.
The very last thing I did at Tapulous / Disney (on my last day) was kill off Twinkle, shutting down the servers. Everybody was quite happy to see it gone.