Nov
UPDATE: The delete function has been restored, but you should still be smart and careful posting to Twitter for the reasons discussed below.
This is a fairly urgent warning to business users of Twitter that applies to everyone. Currently you cannot delete your tweets should you make a mistake that you wish to remove from your profile page.
Be careful.
To some extent, the ability to delete tweets in the first place is a false comfort. Once published, ALL tweets remain searchable in search.twitter.com, even if you delete them. Also, those following you by SMS and most Twitter clients receive the tweet immediately, or at least before you can delete it. As with email, “recall” is an illusion.
That said, it’s still nice to be able to remove typos, misdirected “dm’s” and other undesirable information from your profile page and the web-based stream, and at the moment you cannot. There used to be a trash can icon below the star next to each tweet. If you click through to the individual tweet (the unique URL that contains only that tweet) the icon still appears, but it does not work.
ALWAYS be smart and use common sense about what kind of information you relay via Twitter, and think twice before hitting submit. This applies double to dm’s sent using the syntax “d username message” for if you fatfinger the “d” by accident, your post will show up publicly in your stream.
We’re waiting to hear back from Twitter on why the feature was disabled, and its future status. The feature was restored Friday.
- Bookmark :
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- Stumbleupon
- Redit it
Comments
Leave a comment
-
Subscribe to Our Blogs
-
-
Even if you DELETE a tweet on Twitter, Summize (search.twitter.com) does NOT forget. - rendering this temp warning PERMANENT!
http://twitter.com/SIGEPJEDI/status/1005978380
Since Summize aggregates all of twitters status updates, nearly in realtime, even if you delete your tweet on twitter Summize has still logged your tweet. All someone has to do is search for your status updates on Summize (search.twitter.com) and even your deleted ones will be displayed.
I assume since twitter now owns summize this may be on their radar as a fix.
Deletes, as well as updates, are difficult (but not impossible) to deal with in a real-time search system. They commonly require periodic optimization of the index, which can be an operational challenge. It would be good for users if Twitter/Summize supported this!
This is useful advice to pass on. Thanks, Laura.
Speaking of indexing tweets, I heard a while back that direct messages are not necessarily private but are also indexed. Any truth?
It is really REALLY important for people to know that other than private email, the TWEETS show up everywhere and are also google searched. Always be careful about what is said in tweets. It was never set up to be a private IM service but as social networking which is totally public.
thanks for the comments folks. @sig yes, you re-state a very important part of the post. “deletion” is illusory. but it’s still an important feature.
@ari i am not aware of dm’s showing up in any searches. whether they are indexed in Twitter’s private internal databases, I do not know.
@marilyn yes. and not only google searchable, but extremely Google potent. add to that, words in your profile get Google indexed along with each tweet, so if you tweet “first name only” of someone with your same last name, a full name google search for them will still find that tweet. in other words, if i used my kids’ first names in Twitter, a search for “Name Fitton” would find all those tweets.
Wow, I’ve never realized we had a delete option on Twitter…