Ok I am going to TechCrunch bash. But ONLY because this is a transparent example of how their writing fails recently.
The story is valid and the content of the article is fairly accurate: that the status ID's are going to trip over beyond the 32-bit integer limit which presents potential problems for third parties.
Twitter sensibly pushed this forward by a few hours to make sure it happened in a "were noticing shit right now" period and thus got fixed. They announce this by tweeting a tongue in cheek "Twitapocalypse" message.
The crucial problem is that TC siezed on that idea and hammered at it - yes they do mention it will only affect apps BUT
- They dont mantion that it wont kill Twitter, inference from the article theoretically could go either way and I imagine many people left the page worried Twitter would crash and burn (and that the Twitterati were beavering away to "fix" things). Lines like "Hopefully Twitter will be able to resolve this quickly." emphasis this idea subtely.
- They heavily suggest Twitter themselves are working on this. Whiklst im sure they are trying ot make sure app developers notice it I seriouslky doubt they have all hands on deck to "fix" an issue they themselves arent facing. They were courteous enough to push it up into working hours to give devs a chance to fix errors "live" etc. But there is nothing Twitter themselves have to do, right?
All in all it's a good story written very badly - as a journalist I have to take issue with the sensationalism. It hurts the vendor and wosre it hurts the readers it dupes.
:)
EDIT: to be explicit. It smacks less of bad writing as deliberately badly structured writing to suck in an audience. The former is frustrating but unavoidable - the second is "evil".
The story is valid and the content of the article is fairly accurate: that the status ID's are going to trip over beyond the 32-bit integer limit which presents potential problems for third parties.
Twitter sensibly pushed this forward by a few hours to make sure it happened in a "were noticing shit right now" period and thus got fixed. They announce this by tweeting a tongue in cheek "Twitapocalypse" message.
The crucial problem is that TC siezed on that idea and hammered at it - yes they do mention it will only affect apps BUT
- They dont mantion that it wont kill Twitter, inference from the article theoretically could go either way and I imagine many people left the page worried Twitter would crash and burn (and that the Twitterati were beavering away to "fix" things). Lines like "Hopefully Twitter will be able to resolve this quickly." emphasis this idea subtely.
- They heavily suggest Twitter themselves are working on this. Whiklst im sure they are trying ot make sure app developers notice it I seriouslky doubt they have all hands on deck to "fix" an issue they themselves arent facing. They were courteous enough to push it up into working hours to give devs a chance to fix errors "live" etc. But there is nothing Twitter themselves have to do, right?
All in all it's a good story written very badly - as a journalist I have to take issue with the sensationalism. It hurts the vendor and wosre it hurts the readers it dupes.
:)
EDIT: to be explicit. It smacks less of bad writing as deliberately badly structured writing to suck in an audience. The former is frustrating but unavoidable - the second is "evil".