I must admit, I'm a little confused on some aspects of this. Will the new IDs continue on from the old IDs sequentally? Or will they be completely incompatible with the old IDs?
I have a database of several million tweets that JournoTwit users use. I don't want to have to start differentiating between two ID types and/ or having to completely clear the database out. What I haven't seen amongst any of this documentation - is an example of the new status ids in comparison to the old? That would probably answer a few questions :D And I assume - Direct Messages will be undergoing the same transformation? Spode On Aug 23, 11:45 pm, Matt Harris <thematthar...@twitter.com> wrote: > Hey Developers! > > A while ago we let you know about the new Tweet ID generation service > we developed called Snowflake and published the source code so you > could get familiar with how it works. Today, we're announcing that at > 10am PDT on Tuesday September 21st, 2010 Snowflake will be in use on > our production systems and that status IDs will no longer be > sequential. > > Snowflake still uses 64-bit unsigned integers but instead of being > sequential they will instead be based on time and composed of: a > timestamp, a worker number and a sequence number. For the majority of > you this change will go unnoticed and your applications will continue > to function without the need for any changes. In addition the API is > ready for Snowflake and parameters such as max_id and since_id will > work as expected. Snowflake does mean Tweet IDs will no longer be > useful for data analysis, and things like counting Tweets by > subtracting status IDs will not be possible. > > We listened when you told us about sorting Tweets by ID and knew that > we needed to keep the ID roughly sortable. With Snowflake if two > Tweets are posted within 1 second of each other they will be within a > second of each other in the ID space too. This means although Tweets > will no longer be sorted, they will be k-sorted to approximately 1 > second. > > The key points: > * Status IDs will be unique > * Status IDs will continue to increase - Tweets created later in the > day will have a higher ID that those created in the morning > * Order will be maintained for Tweets allowing you to sort by Status > ID. The accuracy of the sort will be to approximately 1 second, > meaning Tweets created within a second of each other have no order. > * All existing API methods will continue to work the same as before > * Previous status IDs will be unchanged > * There will be a noticeable jump in the numerical value of status IDs > when we change. > > You can read more about Snowflake on the Twitter Engineering > blog:http://bit.ly/announcing-snowflake > > Best > > Matt Harris > Developer Advocate, Twitterhttp://twitter.com/themattharris -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk?hl=en
