socialmedian: Twitter Search Showing Phantom “What A Day” Tweets

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Twitter Search Showing Phantom “What A Day” Tweets

Source: TechCrunch

Oct 08, 2008

Summary

A tipster informed us this morning that Twitter’s search engine (formerly known as Summize before it was acquired this summer) has been showing tweets in its results that don’t actually exist on Twitter itself.

These “phantom” tweets all contain the message “What a day :). Wed, 08 Oct 2008″ plus a time in military format attached to the end. You can find them either by searching “What a day Oct” or simply “what a day :)”. There are so many of these tweets, that the term “What a day Oct” showed up as a trending tweet on the homepage for awhile.

How do we know these tweets don’t actually exist? Just click through to any of the user accounts listed and you’ll see they don’t show up in the user’s archive.

It’s not clear what is causing these inaccurate results but perhaps Summize has been hacked. If that is indeed the case, it raises questions about the security of Twitter’s API.

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