Do this right now: Go to Twitter and type the words “get help.” Or try “get hungry” or “get high” or “get laid.” Really, any two-word pair beginning with “get” will do. Now send the Tweet. What’s that? It vanished? Exactly.
Until just moments ago, I, like you (probably), had been naive to this snafu. It was Former Gizmodian John Herrman who shed light on the situation.
The “get” glitch, as it were, is actually an anachronism from an earlier iteration of Twitter as an SMS service. There are others, too. A whole list of text commands exists to this day, from which weird Twitter traps can be deployed.
Among them:
•WHOIS [username] – retrieves the profile information for any public user on Twitter. Example: whois jack or w jack, for short.
•HELP – texting help or info to Twitter will bring up helpful tips.
and, of course…
•GET [username] – retrieves the latest Twitter update posted by that person. You can also use g [username] to get a user’s latest Tweet. Examples: get goldman or g goldman.
That the “get” command lives on is both surprising and not at all; get + ______ is such a seemingly common word pairing, but alone not enough to constitute an entire Tweet. (I guess?)
There are definitely other code artifacts elsewhere, besides on Twitter, but right now none come to mind. Do you know of any more like this? [BuzzFeed]
