Original Article was published here : http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/06/announcing-snowflake.html
The Alpha Code can be found here http://github.com/twitter/snowflake
A while back to we announced on our API developers list that we would change the way we generate unique ID numbers for tweets.
While we’re not quite ready to make this change, we’ve been hard at work on Snowflake which is the internal service to generate these ids. To give everyone a chance to familiarize themselves with the techniques we’re employing and how it’ll affect anyone building on top of the Twitter platform we are open sourcing the Snowflake code base today.
Before I go further, let me provide some context.
Read more : http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/06/announcing-snowflake.html
