Next Friday (17th June)will be crunch time for many Twitter users in what has been said to be the next millennium bug. Each Tweet is assigned a unique identifier which started with the first Tweet, “just setting up my twttr”, from founder Jack Dorsey kicked things off with an id of 20 (the first 19 were used for testing. Each new post since then has incremented this id by one. With a sudden explosion in the use of Twitter this number has rapidly risen to over 2 billion.

The problem is that identifiers are stored as a 32-bit integers which allows values up to 2,147,483,647. The number of Tweets is rapidly approaching this number and it is anticipated that it will be exceeded on Friday 17th June at 17:26:08.Is it a coincidence that it falls on the same day as the iPhone 3G S?@dcaunt thinks not.

So what?

Whilst Twitter have hopefully taken steps to solve this by just using 64-bit integers many third-poarty apps could have problems. These problems could be anything from Tweets being displayed in the wrong order to not being displayed at all.

With so many thrid party apps, from desktop programs liek Twhirl and TweetDeck to the many many people who use the Twitter API it is inevitable that there will be problems.

The official advice from Twitter is simple “A friendly reminder: we’re nearing the http://www.twitpocalypse.com/. Ensure you are storing status_ids as unsigned integers.”

Or will it be simply like the Millennium Bug and be a lot of hype for a minor issue?

View the countdown timer at http://www.twitpocalypse.com/

As the world goes crazy for Twitter Slate V offer some light relief with their mockumentary about the new nano blogging environment, Flutter. with ‘Flaps’  limited to just 26 characters (a full alphabet set) you can really cut down the amount of time it takes to read and write ‘Flaps’. The service is likened to a hummingbird with it’s wings flapping so quickly, much faster than a regular bird tweets.

“I think a lot of people don’t have time to Twitter. It just takes too long to compose a message with 140 characters, and then you start getting bombarded by a few tweets and it’s like hundreds of characters that you have to read.” , CEO Zak Ryman.