Twitpocalypse Tomorrow

Screen shot 2009-09-21 at 11.56.06 AMYou may recall that a couple of weeks ago, we were on the verge of the second Twitpocalypse. Originally, Twitter’s development team intended to manually trigger the event on September 11, but at the last minute thought better of doing it at the end of the week (that was a Friday) and instead pushed out the event. It now looks like it will happen tomorrow at 11:30 AM PST, an update in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group states today.

I could go into what the Twitpocalypse is for the fifth time, but if you really want to know, just read our previous posts. Or read what developer Ryan Sarver has to say:

For those of you unaware of what the Twitpocalypse is (hopefully no one by now), Alex previously noted “the Twitter operations team will artificially increase the maximum status ID to 4294967296 … If your Twitter API application stores status IDs, please be sure that your datastore is configured to handle integers of that size.”

Basically, the tweet ID (an ID number given to every tweet sent out) will hit the 32-bit unsigned integer limit tomorrow. That will cause any third party Twitter apps not coded for 64-bit to start doing odd things, and potentially fail. The Twitpocalypse will not affect twitter.com at all.

Also note that the official Twitpocalypse counter is still off by a few days. Again, that’s because Twitter is manually triggering this event early to be able to better deal with the event. Sarver notes that his team will be available in IRC for third-party devs that need help.

Hopefully, most of your favorite third-party Twitter apps learned from the first Twitpocalypse and updated their code to 64-bit, so there shouldn’t be too many issues.

The horror…