On the one hand, there are esoteric arguments to be made about how the removal of delted tweets might affect transparency – a kind of revisionist tweeting, as it were, that could leave those on the other half of the conversation in a compromised postion, or at the very least looking like they’re talking to themselves!

On the other hand, there’s human nature. Most of us have (at least once) spilled a tweet that was intended to be a DM, or tweeted in haste and had second thoughts. So yes, having deleted tweets removed from Twitter search would be comforting, in a way.

But there’s the danger – a false sense of security.

Sure, someone can skip about deleting their ill-advised tweets from Facebook and wherever else it’s been cross-posted, but what about all the other third-party services? And the retweets that go into search? And all the RSS feeds scampering over the web, widgetized on blogs and captured by visiting SE bots from there, and so on and so forth…

Once our words are turned loose online, there’s no guarantee that they can be recalled – no matter what Twitter chooses to do to accomodate with its internal Search. You know that – no doubt the bulk of your readers know that and understand the implications – but what proportion of the millions of non-techy social media users are fully aware of how widely their status updates can travel, and how long they can endure?

Just think how many people are under the mistaken impression that setting a Twitter account to “protect updates” should suddenly pull all their pre-existing tweets from the search engine indices and make them private, retrospectively! Can you imagine the misunderstandings, the outrage, the indignant furor of naive Twitter users who, deleting a tweet and finding it gone from Twitter search, suddenly find it frozen in time in the sidebar of a Twitter pal’s blog?

I suppose that one solution could be a kind of “grace period” – where, say, there’s a delay of n seconds or minutes in which you can change your mind about a tweet, before the search engines sweep in to index it…
Or would that create more problems than it would solve?