Tweets and the trashcan

I subscribe to a Diigo group called “twitter freaks”.  This group is very active and each day I get a list of cool twitter tools, news, and tips.  Today, Tweleted showed up in the digest.

Tweleted is an interesting tool with both a “good” and “evil” face (try switching them with the link at the top, but I think you get the same results either way).  According to the author, “Deleting a message from Twitter itself doesn’t delete it from other sites, including search.twitter.com.” AND the messages in twitter search hang around for at least a month (see Search API limit).

I verified this on my own account.  I was experimenting with SMS tweeting, and twitter went down for maintenance.  The tweets were eventually posted, but in the wrong order.  So I deleted all of them.  But they are still showing up on tweleted!  According to twitter, a user can request that a status be manually deleted from the stream.  According to handsmobile, one of the comments in this post, the deleting was not happening very quickly.  I did check that username on tweleted as I write this, and posts prior to early May are not reported.  Either they were deleted, or perhaps they have passed the expiry point!

As a (sometimes careless) user, I think that deleted tweets should be deleted in the stream AND on twitter search at the same time.  After all, it is pretty easy (especially when texting on a cell phone with no keyboard, virtual or otherwise) to made a mistake with a direct message, enter an incorrect URL, or otherwise send a tweet that would better be retracted.  But even if twitter DID remove the tweets more quickly, there are hundreds of third-party apps and clients that maintain their own caches.

So there you go.  If you are going to be visible on the public stream, then you must also accept that (along with so many other things!) your dialogue is and will remain public.  That trashcan doesn’t really mean much!