No Access to Private Tweets - says Twitter

Twitter has once again confirmed the fact that they are not going to allow other search engines access to their private tweets. Because of the recurrent confusion regarding this matter, the website has decided to do something more concrete so that such false rumors do not do the round any more.

The report about the so called ‘Twitter hole’ appeared in the LA Times; according to this report, Google had some kind of a special access to all the private tweets which have been actually protected by its owners from being made public. In reply to this, TechCrunch clarified that this access to protected tweets that Google was given was before these account holders had locked down their accounts and protected their tweets. If the account has been made private after the tweets are released then they cannot be un-cached; this should pretty much clear the confusion that arose out of the whole Google episode.

Twitter has made this point quite clear on its help page where it says that if you have a public account and has decided to make it private, then all the updates after the time of protection will be locked and made private. But all the tweets before the time of protection will still be public to any other user. This rule goes for all websites including Google and Topsy which is a Twitter-specific search engine.

Google always relies on the last information it has in hand and hence will keep re-visiting the tweets that were posted before the account was locked and this will go on for a few weeks or months. But Topsy only displays public tweets; once the account is protected, a click on the refresh button and all the tweets vanish.

It is finally up to the account holder to make sure your tweets are accessed by only those who you want to follow you or you might end up getting retweeted for some of your private tweets.

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