Protecting your tweets is meaningless; you can be read on Twitter Search or Google anyway
Read updates below.
Do you protect your updates on Twitter? Well, don't bother. Thanks to the magic that is Twitter Search, the whole world can see what you tweet with little trouble, whether you protect your tweets or not.
When integrating search into Twitter, the developers seemed to have missed something important, that not all users want what they send to be seen by everyone. But thanks to that oversight, it's dead simple for anyone to see what any other user is tweeting, and all it takes is a visit to Twitter's search page. If you know the user name of the person whose tweets you want to see, you just need to search for "from:username" (where "username" is replaced with the user name in question, of course). From that you get all the latest tweets of that user.
Possibly more disconcerting than this, however, is that protected updates seem to be making their way to Google, as well. In fact, it was Google that lead me to this discovery, as a search there for similar articles as my earlier one about NXNE brought up a fairly recent tweet which was protected.
Clicking on the link to the tweet in question ended up showing me the usual "this user has protected their tweets" message. However, knowing that the tweet had found its way into Google's search index, I decided to search for NXNE-related tweets by that user via Twitter Search. And once Twitter Search provided me with that tweet, I simply searched for all tweets by that user. And once again, I was shown all that I searched for.
I'll not bother with the security implications of this. Your tweets are public, whether you want them to be or not. And if you don't want them to be, there's not much that can be done about it. Things that enter into Google's indexes are rarely excised (and always end up on Chilling Effects anyway), and as for Twitter Search, accidental tweets of mine long deleted still pop up when I use it to look through my history. So your tweet stream is out there now, for all to see.
But given that Twitter is supposed to be telling things to the rest of the world, why did you even bother protecting your updates in the first place? Open up and unprotect your tweets. It's not like there's much choice any more.
Update: (17 Mar 2008 21:49 EDT) As moeffju points out in the comments, if you switch between protected and unprotected, Twitter Search (and Google) will get ahold of your tweets during those times you are unprotected. So if you toggle, you might as well stop bothering with protection. As I myself stated in the comments, a "privacy feature that only works part of the time might as well not work at all". On the other hand it is still possible the person whose tweet began all this maintained protection from before that tweet and the time I found it. I'm awaiting confirmation whether or not this is the case.
Update: (15 Aug 2010 17:49 EDT) No, I will not help you try to read the protected tweets of other people. Stop e-mailing me, asking for my help in this. It is unethical and goes against the Twitter terms of service.
