Twitter picture blunder - A vs B

Question

I hope someone here can help me with this.

I updated my twitter profile picture, it changed the picture fine. But my old tweets still appear with the old profile picture - how can I change it so all my tweets have the current profile picture.

As a result of this: when I google my name, the image search brings up my old profile picture, which I no longer wish to be displayed to public. I asked google to remove the picture but they say that the picture is still live on twitter.

Can anyone help please?

Answer 1

You might be out of luck. I looked at tweet number 25 billion:

curl 'http://twitter.com/statuses/show/25000000000.xml'

and part of the response was:

<profile_image_url>http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/892419025/pinilla_076_normal.jpg</profile_image_url>

In other words, the profile image might be part of the tweet itself, not just a property of the username.

You might use the technique above to see if your old and new tweets have different profile_image_url values.

Answer 2

When you change your profile image then it is changed for all tweets, regardless of when they were posted.

As @ChrisF has mentioned, the reason why you are probably seeing your old pictures is because of caching.