Friday, June 12, 2009

Twitpocalypse Now

Posted By on Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 3:08 PM

If you're one of the twillions tweaked by Twitter-mania in general, and the twoubling twend of adding a "tw" to the beginning of every noun, verb, adjective and adverb, you may have reason to rejoice: A geek version of Nostradomus (Tweetstradomus?) is predicting a major Y2K-like event in the Twittersphere, sometime tomorrow.

Technically, the site www.twitpocalypse.com says 1:30:21 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, but I haven't the motivation to do the Google search to find out what that is in Tucson time. Apparently, the unique numeric identifier for each "tweet" is fast approaching the magic number of 2,147,483,647, which is the geek equivalent of 666. At that moment, the identifiers will become negative numbers, crashing some or many of the third-party software programs dorks like me use to manage our Twitter accounts.

There's even a cool count-up meter of tweet numbers on the Twitpocalypse site, so you can watch the imminent demise of civilization in real time.

There is late word from the Web site Mashable.com that Twitter engineers went ahead and moved up the end of civilization (by skipping some numbers) to right now, so that third-party developers can reboot the world as we know it and still have Sunday to rest (the way the former creator intended it).

If this is the end of the Tweetosphere, Twitterverse, or Twitter-whatever-we're-calling it, enjoy the prescient videos below from Current TV (and they say Al Gore didn't invent the Internet):

If not, feel free to leave your Twitter twexpletives in the comments. I'll even provide a handy link to words that start with "tw" to help you.