The created_at field contains values that are not in order and contain dates that are before twitter existed. For example...
curl "https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=100&screen_name=giafrese&include_entities=1&page=3&include_rts=1" > abc.txt
created a file which contained a tweet with a created_at field having year equal to 1999.
Also submitted cases:
https://twitter.com/#!/jerem/status/7425729876725760 - in 2037
https://twitter.com/#!/jerem/status/8389128780 - in 2036
https://twitter.com/#!/jerem/status/8322802021 - in 2032
https://twitter.com/#!/jerem/status/13368125087 - in 2023
https://twitter.com/#!/jerem/status/2550208765 - in 2020
Updates
- 2011-01-03: We are investigating. Thanks for the reports.
- 2011-01-03: We've identified the root cause but it will take time to fully rectify and back-correct.
- 2011-01-05: The problem that created these erroneous timestamps has been resolved. However, the cached representation of ttweets created with the bad timestamps have not yet been purged of the erroneous data.