Twitter's UID associated to each tweet will very soon exceed 2,147,483,647

Always use a UUID or GUID (same thing) in todays web applications. When we get to terrabytes of data as the norm for apps int based keys are going to seem so ancient.<p>Sure it takes more room but space it cheap, and it makes syncing and distributed databases so much easier (not tied to one machine or cluster)

I figure many twitter apps are written with SQLite as their database (in AIR, etc) so the Integer, Primary Key, can get up to 9223372036854775807<p><a href="http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html</a><p>What is the point of creating a website like this?

Anyone notice the footnote on the estimated time of crossing?<p>"3 the average tweets per second and the Twitpocalypse date are a rough approximation, please do not schedule any vacation around that date"

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I index the tweet id's in Tipjoy with a string: tweetId = models.CharField(max_length=50, db_index=True)

Meh, anyone who's coding for this platform must have put those id's in a unsigned integer, wouldn't they?

More at <a href="http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/06/09/the-twitpocalypse-is-near-will-your-twitter-client-survive/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/06/09/the-twitpocalypse...</a>

It's actually sooner. They assume 83 tweets per second (reference 2) but the number is 200 tweets per second: <a href="http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/50e673d8/some-stats-from-twitter-conference-compared-to" rel="nofollow">http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/50e673d8/some-stats-from-tw...</a>

In the age of multicore 64 bit CPUs, they're not using signed 32 bit integers as primary key, do they?

I'm going to put money down that this will not affect anything.

ALTER TABLE twits MODIFY COLUMN twitid BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL<p>There, fixed, send check for $20 to donations@redcross.org<p>Call me back when they reach 18446744073709551615

That is quite an amazingly high number. Surely 100m people have not posted 2,000 "tweets" each.<p>I wonder what proportion of the total is human-typed, and how much is machine generated?