Whoops, accidentally just replied to author the first time...but... I build this little site about 9 months ago, depending on the monotonically increasing nature of tweet IDs :
http://www.tweelocity.com This is a fun graph : http://tweelocity.com/chart/60/300/ So it would be cool if some way were provided for me to gauge tweet volumes at regular intervals (currently every 2 minutes). I also think it's super cool that the twitter team is even giving a heads up like this. On Mar 26, 1:41 pm, Taylor Singletary <taylorsinglet...@twitter.com> wrote: > Hi Developers, > > It's no secret that Twitter is growing exponentially. The tweets keep coming > with ever increasing velocity, thanks in large part to your great > applications. > > Twitter has adapted to the increasing number of tweets in ways that have > affected you in the past: We moved from 32 bit unsigned integers to 64-bit > unsigned integers for status IDs some time ago. You all weathered that storm > with ease. The tweetapoclypse was averted, and the tweets kept flowing. > > Now we're reaching the scalability limit of our current tweet ID generation > scheme. Unlike the previous tweet ID migrations, the solution to the current > issue is significantly different. However, in most cases the new approach we > will take will not result in any noticeable differences to you the developer > or your users. > > We are planning to replace our current sequential tweet ID generation > routine with a simple, more scalable solution. IDs will still be 64-bit > unsigned integers. However, this new solution is no longer guaranteed to > generate sequential IDs. Instead IDs will be derived based on time: the > most significant bits being sourced from a timestamp and the least > significant bits will be effectively random. > > Please don't depend on the exact format of the ID. As our infrastructure > needs evolve, we might need to tweak the generation algorithm again. > > If you've been trying to divine meaning from status IDs aside from their > role as a primary key, you won't be able to anymore. Likewise for usage of > IDs in mathematical operations -- for instance, subtracting two status IDs > to determine the number of tweets in between will no longer be possible. > > For the majority of applications we think this scheme switch will be a > non-event. Before implementing these changes, we'd like to know if your > applications currently depend on the sequential nature of IDs. Do you depend > on the density of the tweet sequence being constant? Are you trying to > analyze the IDs as anything other than opaque, ordered identifiers? Aside > for guaranteed sequential tweet ID ordering, what APIs can we provide you to > accomplish your goals? > > Taylor Singletary > Developer Advocate, Twitterhttp://twitter.com/episod To unsubscribe from this group, send email to twitter-development-talk+unsubscribegooglegroups.com or reply to this email with the words "REMOVE ME" as the subject.
