Pages

Friday, June 12, 2009

About the Twitpocalypse.

So, I tweeted not that long ago about the Twitpolcalypse, which is the Earth Ending Event... well, not really.  It is actually this bug, where many people who didn't realize twitter was popular, decided to write desktop applications for twitter that use 32-bit signed integers as unique identifiers for people's Tweets.  This means that the maximum number of tweets that can be measured by twitter is 231 - 1... or 2,147,483,647... 2.1 billion.

Anyway, the Twitter API people said they were going to force the Twitpocalypse to happen today at about 2PM, but apparently that didn't happen for some reason, and the unique IDs are a bit lower today... and the real even won't happen until some time around noon tomorrow.  Anyway, as of right now, the count on Twitter is somewhere around 2,136,876,000... and it's going up at a rate of about 200 tweets per second.

In conclusion the end will only come for those who use poorly supported software, or those who don't update their well supported software.  Those of you who only use Twitter on the website have nothing to worry about... with the exception of a planned outage coming soon, but that's pretty normal anyway.  So, happy Tweeting, and make sure you are using good software for it!

Later,

     SteveO