Twitter: Finally, Deleted Tweets Are Gone For Good
Up until now, when a tweet was deleted on Twitter, it would not be gone forever. Deleted Tweets could still be found by searching for someone’s username on Twitter search, as those tweets would still be saved in Twitter’s Search Index. This was a major inconvenience for anyone who erroneously published something and wanted to get rid of it for good.
Fortunately, when you delete a tweet now, it will be immediately removed from Twitter’s Index and its search API. The latter meaning that not even third-party applications will be able to save those deleted tweets. Great news if you were looking for a little more privacy. Unfortunately, nothing on the Internet is ever 100% private and really gone forever, so you still have to be careful what you write.
Some assume Twitter finally corrected this issue because of the recent deals it struck with Microsoft’s Bing and Google to include tweets in their search results. As nobody would like to see one of their compromising “deleted” tweets atop of one of these search engines’ results page.
[ TechCrunch ]
October 25th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
And that’s how it should have been from the start. Glad to see it’s evolving and fixing things.
October 25th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
How can we be sure if its deleted at all?
The moment we type and send it, someone else reads it, and some twitter client would have fetched it. Or maybe, that moment a Google bot caches the page.
I dont think twitter not saving them is a solution at all. But its a start!