Twitter "Twitpocalypse" Snags Mac, iPhone Apps 160
awarrenfells notes coverage in Macworld of what is being called "the Twitpocalypse" — Twitter applications breaking as the number of tweets exceeds 32 bits. "The first apparent victim of the Twitpocalypse was The Iconfactory's Twitterrific for iPhone, which stopped working immediately following the event. ... Atebits Software's Tweetie has also been affected by the Twitpocalypse. The program continues to function for browsing and posting tweets, but searches no longer work in the Mac version and results appear one at a time in the iPhone version."
Strangely reminiscent of a facebook group (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Twitter uses 64bits, 3rd party apps do not (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't surprise me. Even if they started out on 32 bit IDs, they must have realized this was coming at some point and upgraded everything to 64 bits. It's no surprise Twitter was ready for this.
It's interesting that 3rd party apps broke. Why would anyone store the ID of something in a signed variable? I can understand not thinking of using a long, but why a signed int?
Re:Is it just me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Twitter itself was unaffected" (Score:2, Interesting)
I was one of them. I use Twitterific.
Figured it was just overhyped but around 6:30pm my time last night, the app just died. And of course with the Appstore having such a stupid approval process it'll take a while for any fix to appear.
Re:Let's see (Score:2, Interesting)
It just seems to me if have something worthwhile to say 140 char isn't enough.
With the volume of information I am interested in increasing I know there is a sacrifice between speed, completeness and size. I can't see getting good info from 140 char to make it worthwhile - unless we are going to play follow the link and I would rather hit a big blog (eg /. ) that has summaries and many links than try and follow a vast volume of little stuff and piece it together.
Maybe it just won't work for the way I want my information.
Re:Twitter uses 64bits, 3rd party apps do not (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you realize that most of those applications were made in languages where programmers don't even need to know what a unsigned int is, don't you?
Come on.... I saw a lot of applications out there use floats to store ammounts of money, calculate compound interests.
Let's not be that harsh with those app writers.
Deadly Alphanumeric (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, any seasoned DBA or database application developer will tell you that any numeric designator/ID number issued by someone other than yourself should always be represented and handled as a string value to deal with the situation of a numeric designator suddenly going alphanumeric.
If Twitter switched to alphanumeric designators for records, all the existing apps would not only not handle the tweets, some less well written apps would probably crash altogether.
Re:Why is twitter hate so cool around /. (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about it, it's following the progression of the net - primarily social media platforms. MySpace was the first big social media explosion, they had bullitens to send mass messages. Cue Facebook, they had status updates, remember "Joe Brown is..."? Twitter coming in as a 'status updater' is just following a growing trend. The retarded thing is, it's so stripped down that people often resort to public, shortened, grammarless conversations pretending like they're text messaging.
Source: I work at a company who opened a Twitter account, the general population online = assholes.
Re:Why is twitter hate so cool around /. (Score:3, Interesting)