I can’t figure out if this is the inter…

I can’t figure out if this is the internet taking itself too seriously, or good-natured ribbing:

Twitpocalypse is not yet upon us.

The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,6471. 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.

When will this happen? Check here often, and we will tell you how close we are to the Twitpocalypse.

Basically, any Twitter client using signed 32-bit integers to store tweet IDs is gonna overflow and die when this happens. Honestly, though, all this is doing is separating the men from the boys. Anyone who uses a signed number to hold item IDs that start from 1 and go up deserves all the fail they’re gonna get. Not to mention not bothering to make their system remotely future-proof.

Edit: if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, here’s a quick explanation of the problem over at my blog.