Thank you for the feedback. It's great to hear about the variety of use cases people have for the API, and in particular all the different ways people are using IDs. To alleviate some of the concerns raised in this thread we thought it would be useful to give more details about how we plan to generate IDs
1) IDs are still 64-bit integers. This should minimize any migration pains. 2) You can still sort on ID. Within a few millieconds you may get out of order results, but for most use cases this shouldn't be an issue. 3) since_id will still work (within the caveats given above). 4) We will provide a way to backfill from the streaming API. 5) You cannot use the generated ID to reverse engineer tweet velocity. Note that you can still use the streaming API to determine the rate of public statuses. Additional items of interest 1) At some point we will likely start using this as an ID for direct messages too 2) We will almost certainly open source the ID generation code, probably before we actually cut over to using it. 3) We STRONGLY suggest that you treat IDs as roughly sorted (roughly being within a few ms buckets), opaque 64-bit integers. We may need to change the scheme again at some point in the future, and want to minimize migration pains should we need to do this. Hopefully this puts you more at ease with the changes we're making. If it raises new concerns, please let us know! ---Mark http://twitter.com/mccv On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 4:18 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]>wrote: > On 04/05/2010 12:55 AM, Tim Haines wrote: > > This made me laugh. Hard. > > > > On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Dewald Pretorius <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > >> Mark, > >> > >> It's extremely important where you have two bots that reply to each > >> others' tweets. With incorrectly sorted tweets, you get conversations > >> that look completely unnatural. > >> > >> On Apr 1, 1:39 pm, Mark McBride <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> Just out of curiosity, what applications are you building that require > >>> sub-second sorting resolution for tweets? > > Yeah - my bot laughed too ;-) > -- > M. Edward (Ed) Borasky > borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky > > "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul > Erdős > > > -- > To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject. >
