Twitter has necroed, revived, hordes of tweets that had been put to bed as far back as 2006, but thankfully the social networking site and third-party organizations are also providing account holders needed tools to truly eradicate tweets from the past.
Every public tweet posted since 2006 is now searchable on Twitter. Previously, Twitter detectives would have had to rely on third-party software to dig up the earliest of tweets.
"Our search engine excelled at surfacing breaking news and events in real time, and our search index infrastructure reflected this strong emphasis on recency," says Twitter. "But our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every Tweet ever published."
A lot has changed over the last eight years and some of those tweets could come back to haunt some users, poison careers and turnoff followers. Many already have a hard enough time managing current affairs on Twitter, without having to clamor and deal with old tweets long buried.
Yes the Tweetdecks and Topsies provided a line of sight for anyone who wanted to poke around into someone else's past tweets, but Twitter is inviting everyon to look back into the past - people who hadn't known about or cared to look through third-party search tools will uncover a lot more information when they use Twitter's improved search engine.
While deleting a tweet is a simple as selecting "delete" option from the post's "More" icon, Twitter still hasn't put into place tools for eradicating the blurbs in bulk.
For individuals with a batch of tasteless tweets they'd like scrubbed from the Internet, as best as that can be done, Twitter's export option allows users to download an archive of all of their posts. Users can can comb the comma separated value file for tweets they'd like to remove and then delete them through a browser, without having to hunt them down through a search engine.
BUsers can also turn to third-party services to strike down tweets that bear certain phrases or that were written within a certain period of time. However sites like TweetDeleter need the keys to a user's account in order to tackle the housekeeping.
While there are some frightful implications that comes along with Twitter's new search indexing, the improvements also have a practical side. Twitter points to use cases such as compiling a comprehensive batch of tweets surrounding TV seasons or following the history of hashtags.
