Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may break javascript apps)

Re:Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may br... by mayanklahiri on Tuesday November 23, 2010 @07:53PM (#1936040)

You don't even need to go that far. For non-critical applications (i.e., your web app), you can randomly generate a small string, say 12 bytes, using base-62 characters (A-Za-z0-9) to serve as a probably unique user ID (with VERY high probability).

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Re:Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may br... by wahnfrieden on Wednesday November 24, 2010 @06:13AM (#1937054)

Heard of GUIDs? Make part of it a timestamp, and the chance of collisions goes down astronomically further.

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Re:Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may br... by mayanklahiri on Friday November 26, 2010 @12:49PM (#1942827)

In some cases, including a timestamp in an ID can be giving away information considered private. Sure, you could just hash the resultant ID, but then you're getting back to random digits anyway.

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