What type of date is returned from Twitter's API?

If I post a tweet on 08/04/2011 at 9:30AM CDT, the API returns Thu Aug 04 14:19:12 +0000 2011, which translates to 08/04/2011开发者_StackOverflow社区 at 2:19pm. That value is not PDT, and the server I call the API from is in EDT, but none of those match the returned time. I've tried converting to from UTC to my locale, but that didn't seem to matter.

Are you sure it's not UTC? It's UTC is 6 hours ahead of CST and 5 hours ahead of CDT. So the five hour difference is correct in August.

I'd blame the remaining 11 minutes difference on server time on your side, on Twitter's side, or both...