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.
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