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Is the Twitpocalypse nigh?
2147483647. You might recognize it as the maximum value of an integer in several programming languages, or the highest score you can get in a lot of video games, or a number that pops up when you get a database error message. Well, Twitter's numbered tweets are fast approaching 2147483647, and, although I'm sure Twitter's databases are properly configured, a site called Twitpocalypse is speculating that some Twitter apps won't be prepared, causing them to stop working when they can't access tweets beyond the magic number.According to the site, the Twitpocalypse is scheduled for June 14th at 4:46 PM GMT. Will this affect the most popular Twitter desktop clients? Unlikely. However, some third-party Twitter web services could break. There's no telling which ones, and the owners of the sites still have a few days to get their databases ready. Twitpocalypse.com compares this phenomenon with Y2K, and I think that's accurate: it will pass with very few, if any, problems.
Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsJohariJun 10th 2009 11:52AM
I remember when ONTD broke LiveJournal because it reached its comment capacity of 2^24, or 16,777,216.
Brian B.Jun 10th 2009 12:02PM
I'm not sure what about Twitter's constant downtime and performance issues made you so sure their databases are properly configured. In fact, from what I understand most of their scalability issues are database related.
mike k.Jun 10th 2009 12:51PM
I don't get it, what exactly would the third party apps break from? Are they actually restoring all of the tweets on twitter?
I guess some apps will break if they just completely reuse the twitter tweet id as an integer key in their database, but that seems kind of silly honestly..