Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, Mobile, Web, Android, Windows x64, Microblogging
Twitpocalypse II: arriving tomorrow morning
by Nik Fletcher Sep 21st 2009 at 7:00PM
Twitter's phenomenal growth means that people are posting updates to the service faster than ever. Earlier in the year, the number of tweets posted to the service hit a wall: more specifically the number 2147483647 which was the maximum size of an integer in a fair few programming languages. Tomorrow morning, however, Twitter will be forcing through Twitpocalypse II where the number of tweets pushes past the unsigned integer limit of 4294967296. And that may cause issues for unprepared Twitter applications.
In a mailing to the Twitter API developers list, the Twitter API team have reminded developers that their applications need to cope with numbers of this size - and if you're wondering why your favourite mashup isn't working after 11:30am Pacific Time tomorrow, this may well be the culprit.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
acme said 8:18PM on 9-21-2009
delete old twits
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sRc said 8:47PM on 9-21-2009
if they decided to do that right now, they would still have to make some significant changes to their structure to allow for the recycling and readdressing of tweets, and in the end would be a much more complicated system than what it has now
acme said 10:28PM on 9-21-2009
so continuously expanding the limit everytime its hit is a smarter solution?
XBL: Burritoclock PSN:Herbie Hat said 9:59PM on 9-21-2009
Instead of going to 4294967296 they should just go to 42949672964294967296 and completly fix it.... meh
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TVGenius said 10:18PM on 9-21-2009
Just get rid of Twitter. Much simpler and saves humanity.
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Sean said 1:09AM on 9-22-2009
Seconded. If it doesn't save us, well then it should make my WLAN network in the office faster I hope :/
captain underpants and the bringdown gang said 5:26AM on 9-22-2009
Kill twitter? but how will I know when someone is having oatmeal? OH GOD THINK OF THE REPRICUSSIONS. *jumps out a 10 story window on to the back of a horse and gallops off into a painted wall made to look like a sunset*
Plain Jane said 1:21AM on 9-22-2009
Twitter support sucks, really! You can't seem to contact them and even if you send an email to support_at_twitter_dot_com , you get an automated response complete with suggestions...! We want a human's reply not some robot!
I can't log in, my email no longer works on Twitter, and no email arrives when i retrieve my password. Great!
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Prof. Michael Stoll said 3:49AM on 9-22-2009
i love to watch evolutional processes in the internet als well :-)
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shyataroo said 5:28AM on 9-22-2009
If we get rid of twitter...that means I won't know when someone had oatmeal for breakfast or if their nose is itchy or worse... I Won't know when people are hanging out with other people
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Mike said 1:06PM on 9-24-2009
Uh... Twitter64, anyone? I'd imagine 16 billion billion twits should be enough, no?
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