Taylor, We too rely heavily on the sequential, increasing nature of standard tweet and DM IDs. Are both are in scope here?
While it is straightforward to can change code to sort and compare on dates, this will be a major undertaking for our application. I suspect many other applications are in the same situation. This will be a major impact to the community of existing applications. I hope the Twitter technical team recognizes the pain this will cause and has weighed all possible scaling alternatives. Aaron -- Sprout Social On Mar 26, 3:41 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.
