Twitpocalypse Affecting Twitterrific, Others?
June 13, 2009
The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. The unique identifier associated to each tweet has now exceeded 2,147,483,647. For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.Twitter itself is immune to the Twitpocalypse, but third-party Twitter applications can be affected. Many third-party Twitter application developers issued updates prior to the Twitpocalypse, which happened overnight, in an attempt to avoid any troubles. Some were able to avoid the problem like Big Stone Phone, the developers of Twittelator Pro, but others may have not faired so well.
The Iconfactory, the developers of Twitterrific, have issued a statement indicating that their application has officially been affected by the Twitpocalypse:
We apologize for problems that iPhone and iPod touch Twitterrific users are currently experiencing due to the so-called Twitpocalypse. A fix for these issues was included in the 2.0.1 release to the App Store weeks ago, but the application is indeed returning errors at this time. Proof that it’s sometimes difficult to test for errors / conditions that happen in the future. We are investigating a fix to the bug as we speak, but it may take some time to get the fix completed and through the App Store approval process. We will do our best to expedite a new version that corrects these problems to you, but we ask that you please have patience and bear with us. The Mac desktop version of Twitterrific appears to be unaffected. We ask you to follow @twitterrific for the latest news on a bug fix as well as when you can expect the fix to appear in the App Store. Thank you.Now that the clock has struck zero, you should check your Twitter application of choice to ensure that it hasn't been affected. The Iconfactory seems to have been the only developer who has come out and said that their application has been affected, at least so far. Feel free to leave a comment below telling us if your iPhone Twitter application has been affected by the Twitpocalypse.
