Robert Scoble’s accidental tweet (“Frnégtttrdre”) earlier tonite caused a minor ripple: people wondering if he was announcing a secret project, under the influence of alcohol or wandering around with an unlocked iPhone in his back pocket.
It also makes for an interesting test for real-time search.
An hour after his tweet:
- Google lists 7 results (of which a few now point to this blog)
- Bing lists 0 results
- Yahoo lists 0 results
- Twitter search lists 12 results
- FriendFeed lists 20+ results
- OneRiot doesn’t support Unicode in URLs and falls over
- Tweetmeme lists 0 results
Anyone else I’ve missed?
Conclusions: If you tweet a random word, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get indexed right away. Additionally, not every service tests unicode querystring parameters.
When big guns tweet a random word, it was probably done purposely so it makes that word into an internet meme, so blogs can write all about it and people can send tweets about it, so the meme word attempts to stick in peoples minds, and people have to use twitter search and knowyourmeme to look up what the fuss is all about. It is like creating a scene on the road to make people come out of their houses and look through their windows.
What date & time was this post done? Because as of Sept 18, 2009 @ 2:45AM, Bing & Yahoo are showing results…
Yep. It took them a while to catch up. IIRC, they didn’t show results until sometime the next day.
Cool what ‘trouble’ a little tweet can cause.
Maybe the ‘concept of accidental tweeting’ will become something in the future? 