I was doing a little experiment the other day. I had inserted the brain from a cadaver into this robot I’ve been building…wait, that’s more appropriate for my other blog.

I was doing a different experiment to see if I could reduce the number of API calls TweetDeck makes to Twitter on my behalf. (I know, I’m a geek.) I figured that since a request to Twitter for my mentions (@therichbrooks) takes one API call and a search on “@therichbrooks” doesn’t require any API call, that I could just substitute one for the other.

In other words, searching for “@therichbrooks” should bring back the same results as seeing all my mentions, right?

Turns out…not so much. This is a recent example of my mentions column vs. my @therichbrooks search on TweetDeck. I’ve highlighted the tweets that only appear in one column.

You’ll just have to take my word for it that the last few in the right (search) column didn’t appear further down the page in the mentions column.

I can’t seem to find any rhyme or reason: it’s not specific to whether the tweets start with @therichbrooks, whether they’re a RT, whether I follow the person, or whether the tweet comes from a beautiful woman.

I also ruled out the possibility that it was TweetDeck; the mentions page and search at Twitter.com showed the same results as above.

At this point I’m actually keeping both columns up and running on TweetDeck so I don’t miss any other mentions. I just wonder what important messages and opportunities I’ve missed already.

Rich Brooks
Not Getting Your Tweets