How I restored my Twitter account after breaking it using the Mr. Long Tweet Bug

Some experiments don't end well.

See that picture? You see that thing of evil? That’s what I was hit with at twitter.com/flashlightflies after I followed Asianjin’s instructions on how to tear down the 140-character cell in which Twitter imprisons/frees us all.

Well, anytime something is technically wrong, there is a way to make it technically right.

A quick search for “twitter account ‘something is technically wrong'” brought up a number of interesting results, but the first post I went to gave me the hint I needed: Twitter’s API was fully functional, so third-party applications were working.

Oh. Ah! Yes! Ah-hahhhh. Mmmm. The fix, then:

  1. I signed in using Tweetvisor.com.
  2. I found the tweet in which I tried to break the 140-character limit.
  3. I deleted that tweet.

And twitter.com/flashlightflies is back.

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