Is the Twitpocalypse nigh? Update: Mostly no

The Twitterati are stocking their bomb shelters with Twinkies in preparation for the "Twitpocalypse," the time at which the number of tweets sent passes the 2,147,483,647 mark, which is the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer (technically, it's one-half of 2 to the 32nd, minus 1). Each Twitter message has a unique identifier based on that counter.

When the total number of tweets passes that mark, poorly-written Twitter client apps that use 32-bit signed integers may fail or crash, as they will be unable to deal with the values.

(Credit: Twitpocalypse.com)

The Twitter platform itself will not be affected, we hear.

Seesmic Desktop and Twhirl, two client apps made by Seesmic, are "totally safe," Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur told me.

The time that the tweet counter passes the 32-bit limit is fast approaching, but to take some control of the situation, Twitter engineers were discussing forcing the issue by incrementing the tweet counter to that number at 2 p.m. PDT today. That has not happened yet, according to one developer who contacted me (on Twitter).

Update, 3:25 p.m. PDT: Twitter's attempt to hotwire its system to roll it past the dangerous milestone has been delayed. Doug Williams in the Twitter Development Talk group recently posted, "Just an update, there is a lot of coordination that it takes to pull something like this off...the deadline may slip a bit as we work to ensure that we've covered our bases, and that the engineering team is ready to react to unforeseen problems."

Update, 3:55 p.m. PDT: The Tweetdeck client for Twitter has been updated, according to a tweet from the company: "If you need it there is a patched version of TweetDeck (v0.25.1) click on the 'Download now' button at http://tweetdeck.com #twitpocalypse." The "If you need it" clause is cryptic. Will an unpatched Tweetdeck installation fail when the Twitter counter reaches the noted number? A query sent to the company has yet to be answered.

Update: 5 p.m. PDT: Two recent posts debunk this whole thing. Ars Technica says Twitter apps are just technically not likely to fail due to the identified problem, in "No fail-whale purgatory for us." The L.A. Times says the whole thing was a bit of a marketing stunt by the application developer that put up the Twitpocalypse.com site, in "Twitpocalypse? Nah."

The Twitpocalypse site also says that we are now past the key 2,147,483,647th tweet. The site links to Tweet #2,147,483,649 by user @nk. It said, "The Tweets must flow," and linked to a picture of a kitten.

My unpatched version of Tweetdeck is still working.

Update 5:30 p.m. PDT: Believe it or not, there are reports that one app, the iPhone Twitter client Twitterific, is not working. I heard reports that another AIR-based client was giving "weird results," but have not been able to confirm it. Search for #twitpocalypse on Twitter for the latest.

[ellunchboxo]

what?

[sythara]

Slow news day, eh?

[timber2005]

Well I'd say its important. Say we could get a half days notice on when google/gmail/itunes/amazon/walmart.com/whatever were go down because a xth number item was listed, or a switch were to fade into the technological heaven of 0's and the entire site to come to its knees.

Its a warning.

[Aaron Kempf]

I've found a ton of apps that have limits at this range.. especially games

[ddanckaert]

As long as this article was pro bono, everything is fine...

[manualfunky]

brings to mind that pathetic y2K bug crap that the media spouted out to us back in 1999...

[BtmnHatesRbn]

Except this one is ignored by everybody except the author of this article.

[martin1212]

Which would have been much worse were it not for the billions of dollars and vast number of developer years invested in addressing the problem...

[shywolf982]

Any PHP app on a 32-bit system (or compiled for a 32-bit platform) will likely crash, as you can't have unsigned or 64 bit integers on said platform, although I do not think it will pose a problem to anyone (who uses 32 bit anymore on servers?).
Although, and here comes the funny part, there will be no crash at all, but suddenly it will start "confusing" one tweet with the one that got there a few msec before or after.

Ah, should be fun to watch :P

[GlennIsaac]

Gulp! Were Ashton and Oprah 2 of the four horsemen? :)

[Jack K1]

Um - 32 bits support 4 billion unique integers. If Twitter only uses half of them, then they're the twits.

[rocketjam--2008]

Signed integers...half of signed integers are negative numbers.

[Kelson]

I've tried to explain this in layman's terms over on my blog:

1. Every Twitter post has an ID number that goes up by 1 each time.
2. When a computer program stores a number, it sets aside a certain amount of space for it. Bigger numbers take more space because they have more digits.
3. One common format is called a ?signed integer.? It has 32 binary digits (1 or 0 only) with one digit set aside to indicate a minus sign. The biggest number it can store is 2,147,483,647.
4. Twitter?s status IDs are approaching that number.

The one thing that people keep missing is that *Twitter itself* is not affected, because they're using a big enough field to handle it -- it's only third party apps that happened to choose a format without realizing how big the numbers were going to get.

http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/archives/2009/06/12/the-twitpocalypse-explained/

[unknown unknown]

Actually, I believe signed numbers are represented by the two's complement on most platforms these days. It makes arithmetic simpler at a hardware level. Given a signed byte, 10000001 would not be -1 as it would be under the flag system. Instead -1 would be 11111111 and -2 would be 11111110 and so on. It is true thought the most significant bit ends up being a one for negative numbers.

[lofidellity]

Looks like the pre patched version of tweetdeck has a few twitpocalypse bugs, you can't favorite tweets and it forgets you marked tweets as read.

[BtmnHatesRbn]

Hunting for a story, eh?

[SJ2571]

Why the hell do Twitter posts use such a limited format anyway? Does anybody there know how to write a future-proof app? The mind boggles.

[baggyguy1218]

WHO GIVES A CRAP!!!!!

[mab_bond]

Twitterific is broken

[tdinkar]

Choqok was affected. This has been fixed now

[dreynoldsjr]

Twit2Go for Android is dead as well. By far the best G1 Twitter app, and it's been dead since about 11pm last night.

[MonTemplar]

I had to download and install the patched TweetDeck this morning, as mine was showing tweets that I'd already marked read and removed... other than that, I've been able to tweet without any apparent problem... *shrug*

[billmosby]

I have not yet begun to tweet.