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30 comments

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wging
Nice, but with https://twitter.com/timebot empty of tweets I can't help but feel cheated.
kentonwhite
Or is it because timebot hasn't been created yet? Hmmm....
ColinDabritz
It would be fun to create a service where people could 'subscribe' to timebot, and 'send' a tweet including timebot stamp and a later timestamp for their own feed, so that the behavior WOULD be 'from the future' and they could set up things like 'happy birthday' for friends days in advance, and it would automatically rt from timebot, then later on tweet from their own feed.
orf
Interesting read. Obviously not real, its not like hes the only one using the API. And the fact it involves time travel.
georgemcbay
I don't use Twitter, but I'm a reluctant Facebooker (because everyone in my family and a few good friends use it), and it actually suffers from a more realistic version of this problem. I frequently see posts that are like 3 weeks old popping up at the top of my feed, posts that it also showed me 3 weeks ago.
samolang
That usually happens there has been a new action related to the post (i.e. someone liked it and/or someone commented on it) which I like because some people use facebook infrequently and it allows you to see their comments.
brown9-2
Sometimes this is because the status links to a website and the owners are running an ad.
zombio
I love the medium used to tell this story, it made everything seem so real.
peter_l_downs
Made me think much harder than I thought I would this Memorial Day. Cheers.
tumes
Very cool. Just earlier this week I was wondering how someone could take some of the unique storytelling ideas from the likes of Borges and adapt them to modern media. The definitely feels like a step in that direction.
TheCapn
I enjoyed it but was probably most upset with the suggestion that Pres. Obama would be running for a third term? Broke my brief encapsulation with the story.
yahelc
Especially since the closing line implies he hasn't seen any tweets after a date during on Barack Obama (or at least, no Republican) will still be President no matter what for another 8 or 9 days.
semanticist
I read that part of the story to mean that people were tweeting nonsense about who won the next election, not that Obama was actually running.
ihuman
Obama can't run for a second term. That violates the constitution.
[dead] zappbrannigan
He can. He did. He won. He cannot run for a third term.
wging
He can't be elected for a third term under the Constitution as currently written.
rogerbraun
I love these hidden stories. Reminds me of the comp.basilisk faq at http://ansible.co.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html
slajax
My favorite part about this link is that all the comments on HN are almost exclusively one line long. I read all 12 in about 30 seconds.
gee_totes
This makes for an interesting thought experiment:

Maybe all the people I follow on Twitter but don't know in real life aren't real, but merely a series of pre-generated messages, served up by a scheduler.

Replies are done with fancy natural language processing and monitoring of what's popular on the web. Retweets and follows are triggered by your social graph and cookie history.

noonespecial
Its all fun and games until you get a tweet from 1902.
hawkharris
I just had to Google "vertiginous," but that's an interesting word I'd like to use in the future.
arbus
vertiginous - To be affected by Vertigo
loudin
This is a genius way to tell a story. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
gaelenh
I used to get results from the Getty Images API when I'd call it with future time ranges. Most of the photos were from the next week, but there were always a few handfuls from months and years in the future. Just a bug and bad metadata, not time travel. It did allow me to surface photos before they showed up on Getty though.