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Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:23:54 -0400
From: Adam Fields <fie...@street86.com>
To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [twitter-dev] Re: Upcoming changes to the way status IDs are sequenced
Message-ID: <20100331162354.GM9649@lola.aquick.org>
References: <7c003ee51003261341k5e373dc3na9507488551b8949@mail.gmail.com> <382fefe8-a869-4180-b4c8-f0fc6b15f604@n34g2000yqb.googlegroups.com> <01870e03-ef44-482b-8efb-b468599e1827@s21g2000pri.googlegroups.com>
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On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 07:30:00AM -0700, eugene.man...@gmail.com wrote:
> Second that. Our app continuously retrieves feeds of individual users
> and lists. Monotonically increasing are required to be able to do that
> (using since_id).
[...]

Since the most significant bits are generated from a timestamp, later
tweets will always have a higher number than earlier ones (except in
the case of the black hole explorer probe tweeting its progress from
within the event horizon).

To illustrate this with decimal numbers from 0-9:

If two users post three tweets each in the space of three seconds,
they may space like this (the first digit is the timestamp, the second
is the random digit):

User 1: 05
User 2: 06
User 1: 17
User 2: 12
User 1: 27
User 2: 29

Tweets 12 and 17 are "out of order", but they're not really "in
order", since they happened at the same time (depending on the
precision of the timestamp) by different users. User 1's tweets (05,
17, 27) and User 2's tweets (06, 12, 29) will always be ordered
properly by time within each user even though the second digit is
random.

-- 
				- Adam
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