Interesting Twitter Hashbang Bug

This is not relevant, has nothing to do with the hashbang, and is not really a bug. It's an SEO feature. Most websites do this, including big names like Amazon for instance: http://www.amazon.com/The-Ultimate-Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy/... is the same as http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345453743 (and also the same as http://www.amazon.com/The-Holy-Bible/dp/0345453743).

This doesn't really seem like a bug to me. It's like permalinks of the form /a/b/434-some-text-representation-of-object-434 (or like stack overflow does: /a/b/434/some-text )

It's purely cosmetic and meant for search engines (as noted in the article) and easy readability.

I suspect Twitter is fully aware of this and decided it didn't matter when designing it. It's a fairly common pattern to make URLs more readable. I do it intentionally on a couple of my sites as well.

Of course it is a bug. The tweet id doesn't belong to the username in the url. It should return a Page not found error.

how is this possibly a bug? this is done for SEO reasons, many sites do this.. also, this has nothing to do with hashes, very misleading title/traffic trap.

You can do this at github too. Really confused me the first time I saw a commit referenced for a user that didn't have the commit yet...

IMHO

For SEO and UX the current scheme is good. So they should keep using it.

But the problem is thinking that "we use REST so every darn resource on the site has to follow this pattern even though it makes no sense to use it"

I don't think twitter is going to filter by user to see if it matches the url. The key for the tweet is the tweet_id and that's the key to their (hugely cached) DB

I imagine it’s likely used for tracking what links / tweets you were the originator of sharing?

Perhaps in the future you coud have fun with that by associating certain content with people’s Twitter account names. Not sure what affect it would have though. :)

For the record, Twitter are getting rid of the hashbang