Gadget Maven Blog

The Twitocalypse – Twitter’s equivalent of Y2K – happened on Saturday, causing some applications to malfunction and briefly disrupting the Twitterverse.
But like the so-called Millennium Bug it was as much of a damp squib, and may just have been a viral marketing stunt. Either way, it’s made mathematics sexy for a brief time.
Y2K occurred when the calendar clicked over from 1999 (31 December 1999 or 191231 in six-figure dates) to 2000 (1 January 2000, or 200101). Early computer programmers had left out the “19” part of the year, creating global fears for computer and financial meltdowns.
The Twitocalypse was caused when the number of Tweets reached 2,147,483,6471. The number is significant because each Tweet is given a unique identifying number and some applications couldn’t store higher than that.
That two billion-something figure is the highest known number in a mathematical set known as “signed integer,” which uses a 32-bit integer system. In case you wanted to know, the unsigned integer set can go up 4,294,967,295.
The scare was sparked by the twitpocalypse.com webpage, which had a countdown to when that integer would be reached, and was put up by Martin Dufort, CEO of developer Wherecloud, told the LA Times it was “a viral marketing move”.
Luckily the whole system didn’t fall over and most people could still send and receive the 140-character messages that are the most popular form of messaging and social media this year. Facebook was the most popular social networking site last year, and MySpace the year before. Who knows what it will be next year?
Meanwhile, Twitter got some good news when Dell, the world’s second largest computer seller, said it had sold $3-million worth of computers through it’s Twitter account.
It’s been roundly applauded online as a real world demonstration of the value of Twitter, so often derided because people post trivial details like what they had for lunch.
But as the Guardian points out, working with a slightly lower figure: “$2-million is not even a drop in the ocean compared to Dell’s overall sales of $12-billion in the last three months (stat fans: Twitter is the sales channel for 0.008% of Dell stock) and overall the company’s sales are taking a beating – down 23% for the most recent quarter”.
Both these events confirm Twitter’s status as not only the fastest growing social networking site, but also the most hyped. This year.

• This article first appeared in The Times newspaper on 15 June 2009.