I once precipitated a tweet that made it into Politwoops.
Running up to the election, Michael Fabricant replied to me after a night in his local (run by his UKIP opponent) calling his Labour opponent not very switched on. He deleted it the following morning.
Why is this the least bit surprising? Twitter allows you to delete a tweet. This site disables that function for some users but not others. Why would Twitter facilitate this?
You can still archive tweets, you just have to do it manually, probably.
The only surprise here is how many small steps it’s taking for Twitter to complete their slow slide into total unreliability and absolute irrelevancy.
Can’t the same be achieved by screen-scraping? HTML parsing is easy enough to do from scratch, and there are libraries for it that make it even easier.
Voila, no API dependence, no dependence on corporate whims, and with distributed page fetching immune even to IP blocking. Or the feeds can be read via Tor.
Don’t rely on non-official APIs. Duh.
Then don’t use Twitter to publish or keep a record of the deleted tweets? This seems kind of a non-issue. It’s not like they’re being blocked from the internet, or maybe i’m missing the point here. I feel like i am.
That was my fear, that they found some way to disable the obvious workarounds.
As a workaround, why not retweet (using the edit mode of RT) so it’s just text, then use the personal API to read the account? Or snapshot it into a gif?
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