Earlier this morning reporter Rich DeMuro caught our attention with a unusual @Verizon tweet that looked like it was sent from Twitter for iPhone.
While we weren’t the first to see it, or even the first tech blog to publish a post on it, we wrote about it anyways, namely because it was “interesting” that whoever is behind the Verizon account may have been tweeting from an iPhone (Verizon or otherwise) in the days prior to a rumored Verizon iPhone launch.
Well things just got more interesting. Shortly after our post went up the tweet disappeared mysteriously.
Meanwhile over at Cult of Mac, pro-bono TechCrunch fact-checker Lonnie Lazar decided to scan the Verizon Twitter account looking for the tweet we referenced, to no avail. And when he found a similar Jan 7th tweet sent from CoTweet, decided to write a post implying that we had Photoshopped the above image.
“But could it also be an opportunity for one of the most widely followed tech blogs on the net to indulge in a bit of traffic-ramping scammery?”
Um no. Aside from the fact that we weren’t the only ones to see it, the original tweet had a status URL of http://twitter.com/Verizon/status/23790300849766400 and unique Tweet ID which has since been deleted. But not from Google search. Go ahead, try it yourself.
Lo and behold, there’s our disappearing Jan 8th tweet, sent via, that’s right, Twitter for iPhone. Heh.
When we spoke to him on the phone, Verizon representative Jeffrey Nelson told TechCrunch he had heard rumors of the tweet but couldn’t verify it since it no longer existed on the Verizon account. Request for further explanation as to why it no longer existed was met with “No comment.” Twitter has also yet to return our request for comment.
And again, there are plenty of explanations for why some Verizon employee would be tweeting from an iPhone, but there are significantly less for deleting a tweet. Somebody, somewhere panicked.