Twitter Bug: View Friend-Only Private Updates
On twitter, I'm following someone who I cannot un-follow due to a bug in Twitter. Why? Because said person changed their settings I'm only giving updates to friends - I see the message "I'm only giving updates to friends.". Visiting the person's home page, I cannot see the Follow/Unfollow button because the interface only lets me ask the person to allow me to see his updates.
But I can easily see his updates.
Here is how: browse twitter using a mobile phone. Yes the mobile interface shows you these "private" updates but the web interface shows me the message "I'm only giving updates to friends.". I discovered this bug by accident while browsing using my mobile phone, but using a couple of extensions, you can pull off this trick in Firefox.
The screenshot below illustrates the bug. It's basically the mobile version and the full normal version of twitter side by side. The lines map corresponding updates, with the yellow/orange one highlighting the bug.
Download full sizes of the screenshots used to make the image above:
I've filed a bug report with twitter.
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July 23rd, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I actually recently lost about 100 followers by selecting the option to make my tweets private and then switching back to public.
Combined with this issue, it looks like there are some issues to be ironed out.
July 25th, 2008 at 2:48 am
Your loss of followers had nothing to do with your switching form private to public. We experienced a database issue (see status.twitter.com) and had to recover the followers database. If you look now, your followers should all be back the way they were.
I’m forwarding this bug to our team and we’ll see if we can reproduce it. In the future, you might want to contact our support team instead of going ahead with a blog posting — we can fix things faster that way.
Twitter support: help.twitter.com
–john
July 25th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Hi John
Thanks for dropping by. I did file a bug report and got confirmation it’s in the system. The time stamp is July 23 2008, 01:48 PM, and I would be happy to email you the ID.
Pierre
July 25th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Thanks, I just got an email on our internal list, staff is on it.
Hope you’re enjoying your time on Twitter. We’ll try to make things better!