A mysterious Twitter user with the username “home” seems to be getting a rather raw deal. Whenever somebody tries to access Twitter.com/home they are redirected to the Twitter homepage – it seems that this particular account has been grandfathered and overwritten without the user knowing.
This would be fine if the account wasn’t active but strangely it is and has over 35,000 followers despite a measly two status updates. The account is also following neo and TomFulp although it’s hard to believe he can see their updates or even log in to post some more.
The screenshot above was taken from the Google cached version of the page which means that Twitter is displaying different content to Google than they are to real users. This isn’t as sinister as it sounds because they aren’t doing it by detecting the Googlebot user agent – it’s just because the search engines spider doesn’t accept cookies.
Interestingly a lot of users are Tweeting the phrase “@home” to mean they are “at home”. I doubt they are aware that @home is actually a real Twitter user.
[...] evidently not a big deal, but I wonder what will happen to these accounts now that we and TC reader Patrick Altoft – who alerted us to the anomaly – have started pointing them out. I’m particularly interested [...]
I already tweeted about it five months ago http://bit.ly/ZI8RY
don’t forget @404, @500 and the infamous @503
haha interesting hidden celebrity…
Nice english friend i liked reading this thanks for sharing. Nice and mysterious.
Wow, that’s bizarre. How did you even come across this? Poking around Google’s index of twitter or something? :)