While most users may have not realized it, Twitter has had a rather annoying problem for some time now: If you deleted a tweet, it would still reside in Twitter Search’s index. This meant that if you said something you didn’t mean to, or made a mistake that you hoped to correct by deleting the tweet, it was still easily accessible by anyone who simply typed your username into Twitter search. Finally, that’s no longer the case.
Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter’s search index as well. We’ve tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We’ve tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.
This is good news for users from a privacy perspective, as deleted tweets showing up in searches have been troublesome in the past. In one extreme example, a series of tweets that were sent the night two people died in a sweat lodge, but then were deleted, resurfaced on Twitter search.
Of course, with retweets and various services indexing and pulling tweets now, there’s still a very high likelihood that anything you tweet, will still exist somewhere on the web even if you delete it.
Speaking of indexing tweets, the reason Twitter finally got this done may have had something to do with its new search deals with Microsoft and Google. It’s one thing for deleted tweets to show up in Twitter Search, but imagine if a tweet you really didn’t want to send was sitting at the top of a Google search result page. Awkward.
It’s also worth noting that a few services which specialized in finding deleted tweets, like Tweleted, are likely dead in the water now. I tried to use it this morning to find my removed tweets, and it returned no results.
Your failed DMs are now safe(ish) !
MG: yeah, but what about all the *old* deleted tweets? And why do they just “remove” the tweets from search and don’t instantly delete (ERASE!) them?
In my opinion, it’s a total FAIL of twitter that they didn’t delete deleted tweets from the beginning. My deleted tweets are floating around already – damage is reality and can’t be undone.
I also sense that every journalist I met so far hesitates to really criticize twitter. Guess why? They all have twitter accounts and some are even on the twitter favlist.
They still don’t get removed from timelines though. If techcrunch tweet some garbled crap and delete it and repost, I still see the garbled crap in my timeline but not their userpage.
This can potentially cause lots of problems, I wonder when they’ll fix that, seems more important than searches to me…
There’s nothing twitter can do to fix that. Old tweets are cached within your client, it’s not like your client is redownloading the same ones over and over. Just new ones.
I use twitter.com
Hm, it seems to only affect some accounts. I just tried it with an alternate twitter account and myself (with very few followers/following) and it deletes instantly, but if techcrunch do it the tweet remains in my timeline but removed from twitter.com/techcrunch, maybe it only affects such large accounts then.
Silly me
but not untill you are using a twitter client coz they have greater refresh rate
About time! Jeez.
Good news indeed.
http://saveatweet.appspot.com/
Save them before they’re deleted.
I do mess up regularly on my tweets so this is something I have been waiting for.
They still don’t get removed from timelines though. If techcrunch tweet some garbled crap and delete it and repost, I still see the garbled crap in my timeline but not their userpage.
http://www.utluxuryapartmemnts.com
i talked about this before.
You would think its about time that such an important social tool could have something so basic not done.
at twillage, we index tweets that pertain to local events, like concerts, festivals, happy hours, meetups, tweetups, garage sales, etc.
But now we’ll have to double check the tweet have not been deleted ;(
e.g. http://twillage.com/search?q=concert&l=san+francisco&d=today
YES! My drunk tweets will be gone forever!!
I noticed this a long time ago, and completely forgot about it. While I’m truly ecstatic that they’re finally deleting tweets from search (trust me..), what I worry about are the 400+ other services that are retweeting, cataloging, and cross-posting my tweets.
Well all know it: Once you post something, it’s online forever.
Twitter should add a preview button too. I usually end up having to delete tweets when I misspell a username or URL – but I don’t realize it until I post, because then see that it doesn’t show up as a link.
What about Friendfeed? That’s still pulling in your tweets. Does it disappear from there too? Or is it around forever?
I think this is a good thing. People should have full control over the data they generated. And that includes the possibility to delete it.
Good to know! We’ve made a couple mistakes that we didn’t want to send out.
I wonder what they’ll do with retweets, proper retweets like the ones EV does: http://twitter.com/statuses/show/5053258401.xml
Wouldn’t it be better if “delete” actually resulted in a deletion happening?
what about this site and sites like it ? If decided that what just wrote was naff , upon request – will it disappear and get deleted from search results ?
Don’t forget that sites like Friendfeed don’t necessarily delete their copies of what you’ve posted to Twitter, regardless.
Twitter is finally tying the actions of its API to the corresponding feed of what it inherited from Summize — good news! But the reality is that once it’s tweeted, it’s never deleted thanks to third party clients, RSS/ATOM feed aggregators, Friendfeed, Facebook, Google, etc. I recently wrote an article on this for those I know that may not realize “Once Tweeted, Never Deleted” is a maxim to remember: http://www.rjamestaylor.com/once-tweeted-never-deleted-your-reputation-online/
This is excellent news, it is about time!
I just referenced this post and linked to it on my SEO blog at the following URL:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/10/27/twitter-tweets/
What about twittering audio messages? Check this survey http://tiny.cc/KxgSl
No .. My deleted tweet still exsit in the Twitter real-time search result..