Expect the calendars to be reset shortly
It’s a bright cold day in May, and Winston Smith has been busy:
Given the widespread belief that Obama invented the Internet, many will scoff at the idea that the Bush White House had a Twitter account. But it did — and the administration handed over twitter.com/thewhitehouse at noon on Inauguration Day, just like it did with the whitehouse.gov website. Google still has the old account, with Obama’s tweets, in its cache.
Valleywag alum Paul Boutin suggests on Gadgetwise that this is a simple rationalization of accounts, matching the definite-article-free “whitehouse” username the Obama team uses on Flickr and YouTube. But Obama’s Twitterers didn’t just change the username on the account; they started fresh, wiping out all of the White House’s existing Twitter followers, and the entire archive of messages.
In fact, they did more than that. Forget the Google cache:
Actually the Google cache just points to the now-blank pages where the tweets used to be. The actual content has been permanently erased. So if you’re a Communication scholar or historian studying early Presidential uses of social media technologies, you’re screwed.
Not to worry. No matter what you heard, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
(Via HeatherRadish.)
