Within the next few days, some applications and mashups based on the Twitter API may behave unpredictably or even crash – at least that’s the warning given by Canadian software company WhereCloud’s Twitpocalypse website. This impending “Twitpocalypse,” much like the famous Y2K bug of 2000, is based on a data processing limitation.

Every tweet in Twitter’s system is uniquely identified by an integer value. For example, the system’s very first public tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is tweet number 20 (presumably tweets 0 through 19 were used for testing). The maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648. This is a huge value, but the accelerating popularity of Twitter means has the amount of tweets is rapidly approaching this limit. If third party application developers haven’t designed their Twitter clients to store tweet IDs using something like the less restrictive unsigned 64-bit integer data structure, users might start seeing strange errors, such as tweets listed in the wrong order – or worse, applications not working at all.

There’s really no way I could have explained it better so I’m just going to quotelink the whole thing  and be done with it. Now to go find a rock to hide under until it all passes over… I’ll try to twitter from there for as long as I can and I’ll see you again after the Twitpocalypse!