I am wondering how Twitter communicates statuses messages that may have existed at one point in time but have since been deleted by a member.
Scenario: 1) John hits publish. 2) Message broadcast to all requesting (including firehose) 3) John doesn't like the message and deletes it 4) He might perform something closer to an edit and publish a second status soon after Example: http://twitter.com/GSouder/statuses/1138232864 In the HTTP world we would just return a 410 Gone status on the Twitter.com page for the given status message. Twitter currently returns a 404. It might be helpful to add another step before returning a 404 on that URL pattern to instead check for a status that did exist at one point in time but is not coming back. Given the firehose of new statuses the scenario might require a second firehose of removals. I ran into this problem while using Twitter search. The returned status doesn't always exist on Twitter.com but the search client consuming the firehouse might not update. -Niall Kennedy
