Comments on: Mind Your Ps & Qs: Twitter Delete (Now Restored)

By: Punch Inactive Users in the Face! | Kyle Lacy, Social Media - Indianapolis

Punch Inactive Users in the Face! | Kyle Lacy, Social Media - Indianapolis — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:02:13 +0000

[...] Mind Your Ps & Qs: Twitter Delete Disabled (pistachioconsulting.com) [...]

By: Zoli Erdos

Zoli Erdos — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:02:44 +0000

Wow, I’ve never realized we had a delete option on Twitter…

By: Laura Fitton

Laura Fitton — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:15:55 +0000

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.

By: Marilyn Sholin

Marilyn Sholin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:35:57 +0000

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.

By: Ari Herzog

Ari Herzog — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:48:11 +0000

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?

By: Adam Hertz

Adam Hertz — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:53:41 +0000

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!

By: sigepjedi

sigepjedi — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:39:53 +0000

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.