Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

g1smd — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:48:58 -0000

Err, nothing happened? Not unless you include several nuclear power stations that had to go on manual override, various automated systems on the fritz until they were reset manually, and numerous places where you could see dates like 1/1/100 and 1/1/19100 the following day.

There was real potential for the whole financial system, and all utilities (which mostly run on automated systems) to break when the year flagged as 00 or 100 or 19100 instead of 2000. Millions of computer systems had to be updated and altered to avoid those problems.

The difficulty was in getting people to realise that these deficiences had been built into their systems. Many did not believe it - until they tested it.

There are more such incidents to follow in the next few years and decades as other systems run over the end of their numbering scheme... programmers have seemingly learned *nothing* about future-proofing their systems in the intervening time.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

g1smd — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:41:27 -0000

The exact ID number of the failure point is known.

The currently used ID number can be found easily enough at any time.

Work out how many tweets per second are being sent... and very simple maths can extrapolate a rough date and time for the failure.

It's not rocket science.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

g1smd — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:35:06 -0000

*** If there was a serious bug that was going to affect your Tweetie, Seesmic Desktop, or TweetDeck, we’re pretty sure that Twitter would have made some mention by now. Even if there was an issue, Twitter could probably fix it on their end. ***

Wow! Just show how much you don't understand the technology why don't you?

The problem is real, and the problem cannot be fixed at Twitter's end. The problem is that the applications have not reserved a big enough space to store the tweet number. They haven't allowed for 'big enough' numbers. When the numbers are 'too big for the storage space' they are 'corrupted', just like when you only have 6 digits available, the number after 999999 is 000000 because there isn't room for the seventh digit.

In Twitter's case they are using much bigger numbers (32-bit as it happens). They have to, as there are several hundred tweets per second, 24 hours per day, and the service has been running for years.

They might be better off changing to a different numbering format, one that incorporates at least a part of the date as well (and with at least a 4-digit year), to avoid this happening again.

Just wow! on the uninformed nature of the article.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

rsy611 — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:22:47 -0000

Yeah, everyone keeps comparing this to Y2K. And all I remember about Y2K is that.... absolutely nothing happened. Maybe I should start some ridiculous rumor on Twitter and see how many people I can get to believe it....

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

james — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:11:10 -0000

'I break the sensationalism down like a sledgehammer to a glass sculpture.'

The funny part is, I actually think he's being serious!

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Ben Parr — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:05:40 -0000

Read the rest of the post. I break the sensationalism down like a sledgehammer to a glass sculpture. :)

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Gerald Weber — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:23:17 -0000

On mai gawd! the Twitpocalype is coming! I'm stocking up on firearms and canned food as we speak! ;-)

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Guest — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:06:32 -0000

Lack of age restrictions? Hmmm. I see how something like "if you are under the age of 13 you must have permission from a parent or guardian" is a good idea…but I haven't seen any five-year-olds on twitter at all.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

rohmadbasuki — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:05:46 -0000

wow...nicend verry helpfull

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

darkened jade — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:41:23 -0000

The thing is, this is like making a movie about people taking over the internet, nobody cares. The world, miraculously enough, goes on. Even those, like me, who have fast become addicted to twitter and hit the on button to my computer as soon as I enter the house, realise that even if it goes down, a few days later everything is back to normal and all we're left with is another bad t-shirt.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

carriesmith1800 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:30:04 -0000

Is it wrong for a man to have a sugar baby or a woman to have sugar daddy??

It is an absolutely extramarital relationship, but more and more services came out on Internet focusing on this kind of relationship.

such as ^-^ http://SugarDaddyChat.com/ ^-^
it's the biggest sugar dating site for beautiful woman and rich man!

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

photis — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:29:55 -0000

Sigh.

"When Twitter goes down..." - Twitter is not going to go down, Twitter is not even involved in this. Stop the innuendo. At worst some obscure 3rd party Twitter client might misbehave. So what? go back to the web version or pick another client. Problem solved.

Does Mashable really need this sensationalism to increase readership?

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

techsupport — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:35:27 -0000

What basis does this website predict a Twitpocalypse anyway?

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Josh Fraser — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:46:22 -0000

They did. They put a note up on the developer forum a few weeks ago as a friendly "heads up".

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Carrie — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:31:23 -0000

I can't stop laughing!

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Nikolay Kolev — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:36:48 -0000

Yes, it's easy to change the type of a DB field... but the problem is that doing this on a huge, heavily used live DB can take forever and it's hard to do it without downtime, if done in the last minute. So, hopefully, they've done this migration already!

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Miguel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:34:41 -0000

Yeah, well, I don't know why any of these developers would use signed integers for numbers that will never need to be negative, if they did, they should be able to easily switch to unsigned or bigint like you said in your previous comment.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Miguel — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:52:08 -0000

This is clearly a hoax, it's true that an integer in MySQL can hold 2,147,483,647 BUT, MySQL also provides BIGINT's which can hold 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 unique ID's, how do I know this? I work with MySQL databases.

If you don't believe me read this MySQL post about numeric types.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/re...

In fact, an UNSIGNED integer can hold 4,294,967,295 , so twitter doesn't even have to switch to bigints, if they haven't already, which by the way is easy to do.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Michael Bauser — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:47:47 -0000

If Twitter dies at 5am Saturday morning, nobody here will notice -- we'll all be busy hammering Facebook's servers while trying to claim our favored userids.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

AlexsSystem — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:54:04 -0000

Internet changes way too fast. New websites always come up and gets blown up and die once their time has come. Twitters time will come to and has nothing to do with a virus. Ever since the birth of internet social networking sites have been poping up and dying. Latest example to experience will be myspace.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Ben Parr — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:47:42 -0000

To keep you informed of something that is confusing a lot of people.

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

@LStacey — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:38:17 -0000

Yeah, it'll be fine because They would tell us if there was a problem... Twitter are really good at communicating with their users...

Oh crap! Run for the hills!

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Vera — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:23:08 -0000

I think twitter is about to get into the chaos :D.

Greetings from http://www.verasoul.com

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

Aaron Landry — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:22:41 -0000

And why would Mashable post about something that is clearly a total hoax? Oh yeah, this will undoubtably be a trending topic. Traffic$$$$$$

Re: The Twitpocalypse Is Coming! Is Twitterland Doomed?!?

James — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:14:59 -0000

http://www.twibeo.com is a Twitter-like site that lets you say what you're doing by sharing text, photos and videos right from the page! Join us @ http://www.twibeo.com