How do you (or the OP) know the implementation details of the consumption path for display? The author assumes it was the direct JSON feed from Twitter. That'

How do you (or the OP) know the implementation details of the consumption path for display? The author assumes it was the direct JSON feed from Twitter. That's overly simplistic and betrays his inability to understand how these sort of things are put together. This is a public, real-time event; more likely than not tweets were filtered through one or two other components to separate the interesting material from the noise. You have no idea what those intermediary components were, who set them up, and if they were all decoding/reencoding correctly. Perhaps they were going through other Twitter users' clients, which could have contributed to the bug. Edit: yes, there were definitely people curating the questions, so it could not have been as simple as pulling one JSON feed. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/how-obama-tries-to-win-twitter-influence-people/241552/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/how-obam... https://twitter.com/#!/townhall/july-6-curators https://twitter.com/#!/townhall/july-6-curators