lately I've noticed tweets with times out of order on twitter.com. for example, earlier today http://twitter.com/#!/warrenellis showed:
Previous Marvel EIC Joe Quesada becomes Chief Creative Officer, to be addressed as "Comandante" 4 hours ago http://twitter.com/#!/warrenellis/status/22352255088852993 Axel Alonso becomes new Editor In Chief of Marvel Comics, institutes celebratory beatings companywide 3 hours ago http://twitter.com/#!/warrenellis/status/22351328088956928 ... The brilliant novelist @steveaylett is guest writer today at my site: http://bit.ly/epD01V 4 hours ago http://twitter.com/#!/warrenellis/status/22332045711646720 calling twurl /1/statuses/show/ for each of the above ids yields: 22352255088852993: <created_at>Tue Jan 04 20:29:07 +0000 2011</created_at> <statuses_count>12853</statuses_count> 22351328088956928: <created_at>Tue Jan 04 21:07:31 +0000 2011</created_at> <statuses_count>12852</statuses_count> 22332045711646720: <created_at>Tue Jan 04 20:00:10 +0000 2011</created_at> <statuses_count>12851</statuses_count> Is this expected? they're correctly sorted by status id, but the created_at times are out of order, and incorrect judging by the statuses_count. It looks like created_at values are used behind the scenes in some REST queries using sinceid, since if I try to get statuses since the middle tweet above, it won't include the first tweet, which has a higher status id but earlier created_at time: $ twurl /1/statuses/home_timeline.xml?sinceid=22351328088956928 | grep 22352255088852993 $ (to reproduce the sinceid bug you have to use tweets from people you're already following; if I start following warrenellis from another account after those tweets have happened, the above call includes the top tweet.) another example from my home timeline, in order shown on twitter.com earlier today: codinghorror Jeff Atwood A call to all community minded sysadmins http://goo.gl/Vfo8P 4 hours ago (http://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/22357712645918720, created_at = Tue Jan 04 18:24:28 +0000 2011) arstechnica Ars Technica Warrantless cell phone search gets a green light in California: http://arst.ch/npo by @ejacqui 3 hours ago (http://twitter.com/#!/arstechnica/status/22357602243448833, created_at = Tue Jan 04 19:51:52 +0000 2011) BoingBoing Boing Boing In Egypt, an iPrayer http://bit.ly/gsFfHp 2 hours ago (http://twitter.com/#!/BoingBoing/status/22357128580694016, created_at = Tue Jan 04 21:08:45 +0000 2011) BoingBoing Boing Boing Cute, friendly, non-threatening bear hat http://bit.ly/gKsaAP 4 hours ago (http://twitter.com/#!/BoingBoing/status/22357124545773568, created_at = Tue Jan 04 19:06:26 +0000 2011) -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
