I have a service that automatically deletes DMs that match certain keywords on behalf of users. This has been particularly beneficial in the wake of the recent worms going around. Our users get a couple when the worms start propagating, but after that, they're protected because of some of the technologies we have in place. The problem with this is that most Twitter clients out there don't check for past DMs that were deleted, so the users' DMs still show up in their timeline. This is understandably a hard issue to tackle because right now the only way to know a past DM was deleted is to re-search their DMs for deletion.
I have two suggestions - the first is to Twitter. Is there a way Twitter can provide some sort of live deletion API notifying developers and Apps when messages are deleted so they can remove them also from their clients? My second suggestion is to developers. I have an API for this if you're interested. If you're open to searching our DM database for DMs, we'll provide you the clean DMs that users have opted to receive, and leave out the bad DMs. This way those deleted won't show up in your client. I am also open to working with you on a live deletion API where my app notifies you of deleted DMs, along with an API letting your users set keywords, get keywords, etc. that the users have filtered. I think there's huge potential here to clean up Twitter if client developers are willing to work with us on this. Let me know if any of you are interested. Ryan, et. al, I'd love to expose this to Twitter.com as well if you guys are interested. Jesse
