Note that there are no hard delivery order guarantees in the Streaming API: ordering is best effort.
This issue is most apparent when using the count parameter for deep lookback during Streaming API server restarts and also during the apparent race condition between status creation and status deletion. Yes, deletion notices may be delivered in advance of the status itself. Even in this apparently odd situation, the delete statuses still must be purged from your backing store. -John Kalucki http://twitter.com/jkalucki Services, Twitter Inc.