Dude, what?

So. A strange thing happened to me on the twitter today.

I got a dm from a friend, a man who I've met & gone drinking with in real life. A nice man. A man who has given me every impression of being someone who knows how to spell. A man who may not be responsible for the below, and therefore, will not be named here. (Yet.)

Here's a non-verbatim (I'll get to that) transcript of the conversation, over the course of twenty minutes or so:

him: u r hot :p

me: dude, what?

him: dude?! duuuuuuude!?!?

me: Don't mean to sound stroppy, and I may be missing the joke, but you realise you're talking to a married lady, right?

No response.

THEN something weird happened.

I went to check my dms, and 'u r hot :p' wasn't there. Creepy. So I dm'ed him:

me: how did you retract that dm?

him: ?!?!?!?

me: I had a dm from you that said 'u r hot :p', and now it's gone

...and then it got weirder again. All his dms disappeared. That was disconcerting, but worse, MINE to HIM disappeared as well!

By this point I was assuming that someone had hacked my/his account, or both, and that I probably had a new tweet-eating, emoticon-based virus. (That's why it's not verbatim - the entire record of conversation has been wiped). But no! No, it's weirder than that. My colleague and I experimented, and here is what we found out:

If you dm someone, and then delete it, it disappears from both your streams

If someone dms you, and you delete it, it disappears from both your streams

Madness!

Call me crazy, but I don't like the idea of having my work wiped at someone else's whim. That's peanuts, though, compared to the scary prospect of the bullying that this could enable. You could send as vicious a message as you could fit in 140, and remove it before trouble happened.

So all - if you (or more importantly, your kids) ever get an unwelcome dm that you want to have on the record, screenshot it.

And as for you, Mr :p, I'm going to go on ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm assuming that you left your account open and someone with an aversion to vowels and a fondness for punctuation used it to play silly buggers. I could be wrong. You could be a jerk.

But I really, really hope not.

**UPDATE** No, it wasn't him - it was a prankster. Thank goodness for that.