Thursday, June 02, 2011

Weiner's Tweet History - never tweeted a yfrog pic from Tweetdeck



The Summary: Weiner has never posted pics on his twitter via Tweetdeck, yet was only posting from Tweetdeck on the evening of May 27.

The Blather: Obviously, #Weinergate is all the rage right now, and I've made some comments on blogs and twitter about the potential that Weiner's yfrog was "hacked" via their "private" email system, which Cannonfire has ably been investigating. Its a possible explanation, at the very least. Rachel Maddow explained the theory fairly well last night. Yfrog has now (at least temporarily?) disabled posting via email. (See this analysis on Little Green Footballs for more info.)

So, this is not a HUGE REVELATION POST!!!111 but I wanted to note some observations about Weiner's twitter history, which would make it inconsistent for him to have made the infamous dicktweet on May 27 himself. Its not absolute PROOF of anything, but I wanted to share for those interested.

According to all tweets currently appearing on Weiner's twitter page, he has tweeted 478 times since his first tweet on October 25, 2009 (he didn't actually start being active on Twitter until August 2010, but he sent a single tweet in October 2009).

Weiner's history shows he has tweeted links to yfrog pictures 7 times (excluding the now deleted tweet.). On six of those occasions, he did so by posting "via Twitter for Blackberry". (4 times on May 5, 2011; once on November 3, 2010, and once on September 26, 2010.) On the other remaining occasion (on 2/25/2011) he posted "via Yfrog."

Weiner has never posted a yfrog link via any other Twitter posting option. However, his tweets on the evening of May 27, the first of which came no more than a few minutes after the dicktweet, all came from "Tweetdeck." It would be odd (though not impossible, granted) for Weiner to send a pic "via Twitter for Blackberry" at the same time he was on Twitter via Tweetdeck. TweetDeck is a desktop application, and though there are Android and IPhone versions of it, there is no Tweetdeck app for Blackberry available yet.

What about the dicktweet, you say? Where was that tweeted from? Well, we do not know! There is no existing or known screen cap of that tweet (UPDATE: See below). Twitter user @patriotusa76 retweeted the dicktweet maybe 3 minutes after it was posted, but has not produced a screencap. (He did screencap the yfrog page, but that doesn't say how the pic got onto twitter.) And Tweetcongress' feed showing the dicktweet, which many saw as the story started to spread (multiple screencaps exist), does not display how tweets it reposts are posted. So we don't know how the dicktweet was posted right now.

So, it would be interesting to see where the dicktweet was posted from. If "via Twitter for Blackberry," it would be odd that Weiner was apparently on tweetdeck around the same exact time. And the EXIF information on the dickpic which has been shared suggests the pic was taken on a blackberry, but didn't match the same EXIF information that weiner's other yfrog pics do (because weiner's pics identify his BB as a model 9650, the EXIF information on the dicktweet doesn't identify the BB model.)

Other random info: Of Weiner's 478 tweets, 208 are "via web", 107 are "via Tweetdeck" (first used 8/18/2010), and 74 are "via Twitter for Blackberry." And in the scary department, @PatriotUSA76, the sole person to see the original dicktweet, has used the word "Weiner" in 571 tweets since joining twitter in January 2011!

ETA 12:33 EDT: I see the Smoking Gun may have more stuff up right now that may shed light on tweet source. Hopefully I didn't just waste 30 minutes on this blogpost. haha.

12:47 EDT: The Smoking Gun has all the screencaps which @PatriotUSA76 sent by email to Breitbart. However, the timeline cap he sent is using the "new twitter" which does not show where a tweet was sent from - arrgghhh -- the "old twitter" does contain this information.

Oddly, his timeline screen cap shows the dicktweet sent "25 minutes ago" - does twitter automatically update that timing on your screen? I thought the dicktweet was deleted within a few minutes? Is this weird?

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