Perpetual Work in Progress

Suppose you are following someone (@firstperson) who said “@cooldude I am looking forward to tonight.” But when you tried to check out that person (@cooldude) you found they had protected their updates. Well, these are not so protected. If you Google the person’s username (cooldude w/ no @symbol) as well as the @firstperson you will probably find a status in the results. Click on Cached and you will see the person’s stream for the last 20 or so tweets. I realize its not a huge deal to most, but if you are using Twitter with protected updates it might make you think twice about what you tweet. I haven’t explored this any further in depth to see if its just the most recent tweets, or if you can google some specific keywords along with the usernames if you know more info. I am trying not to show too much to avoid exposing names, and if you can’t figure out how to do this then its probably a good thing, but the problem is that there are people out there who can and will.

Here are a few screen shots of what I am talking about. Again I had to blur most of it to protect identities, but maybe it will make things a bit clearer what we are dealing with.

google view

Click Main Result link from Google

This is what you see if you click on "Cached"

I think this is something Twitter needs to figure out fast how to fix which is why I am pointing it out. As you can see it was too much for 140 characters. Thanks and please RT.

Update:  8:43am Sunday May 10th, 2009- Thankfully some people are protected even with this workaround.  I am finding that when you google this way and all you see in the search excerpt are the follower usernames then the link will just take you to the protected message.  BUT if you see the excerpt and it references a portion of a tweet, the cached version will take you to the whole feed view.

Tags: Twitter