Deleting Tweets
This fall has been an interesting one in the news from Iowa. Its goofy season here so every day there is some political news coming from the state. I can’t wait for the caucuses so we can vote some of these bums out of the running.
But more importantly, it started in early fall at the Iowa / Iowa State game when a guy names Carson King held up a sign stating he needed some beer money.
Not only did the people of Iowa respond, the whole nation did. Over the following weeks, he would raise close to 3 million dollars for the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital
But… what about his past…
Like all stories these days, there seems to be a “but…” to the story. Here is a guy trying to get some beer money that goes entirely out of control. He decides to do something good with it and donate it to a children’s hospital on the campus of the rival school. During a story into Carson, a journalist finds some tweets from 8 years prior that were inappropriate and brought these to Carson’s attention. This shot a rift through the state. The King was tarnished, the good deed was tarnished. Corporations that were putting up money suddenly backed out. For a simple mistake in 140 characters 8 years prior.
So what does this have to do with me?
Absolutely nothing! I’m not Carson King. I’m not suddenly in the spot light raising millions of dollars. But I also don’t want to have to worry about anything that I may have put out on twitter to be taken in an ill light. Most of what I have looked back on was me either talking about Puppet or VMware. I don’t think there is anything there I need to worry about, but I also just don’t need a long tail of my thoughts out there forever on the web. So I’m cleaning them up and putting in a program that will automatically drop off anything older than a year old.
This will remove a lot of my tweets that I’m ok with that. If anyone wants to know more about my thoughts, skills, etc, they can look at this blog and get a better idea of all of that.
All in all, this has removed 3204 tweets so far. I was originally working on a script that would do this for me, but there are only so many hours in the day. Instead I found an application that will do this for me. I’m now using tweet delete to remove any tweets that are older than a year and have it run every couple of days.
So long tweets, you will not be missed.
