Twitter is planning to undergo a second Twitpocalypse, this time increasing the maximum status ID to 4294967296. Twitter programs that store status IDs must be updated to handle integers of this size or they will cease to work correctly after the update.
Ryan Sarver, a member of the Twitter Platform Team, has posted an update to the Twitter Development Talk Google Group stating that the planned update will be triggered tomorrow at 11.30am PDT (18.30 UTC). Twitter staff will be available then to help client developers on IRC and via the developer mailing list. It is unlikely that there will be too many problems, as developers have been given a fair amount of time to update their programs so that the transition will be smooth.
The update comes at a rather inconvenient time, as many of the developers of various Twitter clients will be at The Twitter Conference tomorrow, so users may face prolonged downtime should there be problems with a client. As Caliban Darklock notes in his response to Sarver’s post, even if a client has already been updated, its developers still need to be on hand when the update is triggered to ensure that everything goes smoothly and fix any unforeseen problems should they arise.
[Image from flickr.com/photos/jacobms]
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