A quick search for “git tower” on Twitter returns results limited to the past six days, only. (A quick shout-out: Tower.app for OS X gets our award for best Mac development tool of 2010!) And the same goes for searches for “NeoSmart” or “EasyBCD.” (Unfortunately, none of these topics are anywhere near “trending” on twitter, and the low volume of search results serves to prove the point).

Whether this is a case of Twitter purposely capping duration of search results to cope with high load times (each new search is taking ~.6 seconds, which is rather a lot!) or if somehow this data has been lost due to the server outage, it’s cases like these that really illustrate the need for “Twitter archives” that maintain a persistent, searchable store of Twitter feeds. While 3rd party Twitter search utilities *do* exist, nothing official and guaranteed exists as of yet.

Let’s hope this capping of search results is only temporary and that earlier results will become available as the days go by. It would really suck to lose something as basic as fulltext search for tweets older than a certain amount of time (especially if it’s a low number)!

Follow NeoSmart Technologies @NeoSmart on twitter!

A post on twitpic earlier today asks

Can’t get why #flotilla is not trending; censored, why?

and articles on the web search for explanations, since it’s very clear that flotilla is indeed a trending topic, going by the trendistic results (see below).

Some are saying that twitter needs to manually approve trending topics to prevent abuse, etc. but there’s something that doesn’t add up: why is twitter actively blocking searches for #flotilla?

You can check it out for yourself: for the past hour or so, searching twitter for #flotilla turns up the dreaded “Something is technically wrong” page but searching for any other #topic works!

As they say, the proof is in the pudding (images after the jump):

Update #1 ?srail is now appearing on the Trending Topics list, but the search for it also returns a technical error. Reports indicate that these searches are being blocked from the USA (LA-region), Middle East, Sweden, UK, and more. However, search is working from Germany and Denmark. Check back for more updates.

Update #2 According to twitter PR, it was a technical issue and they’ll "post more info" shortly. No sign of that follow-up info yet though.. makes it hard to believe.

Searches for #flotilla:

Searches for #somethingelse:

Flotilla as a trending topic on trendistic: