What does +0000 mean in the context of a date returned by the twitter API?

Question

This:

"Tue Jan 12 21:33:28 +0000 2010"

was returned from Twitter's API. The rest are fairly obvious, but what does +0000 refer to? Is it some type of denotation of a timezone?

Answer 1

This does denote timezone. It is the offset from UTC time.

Answer 2

+0000 is an HHMM offset from UTC/GMT, and in this case the time you're getting back is exactly UTC.

Note that this doesn't exactly map to a "geographical" time zone, since daylight savings time may change the offset. For example, Sweden is +0100 in the winter and +0200 in summer.