When a HN twitter bot has tweeted this story, I actually clicked on the link.
Genius.
Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#12Seems to be back up: https://t.co/uHJO6BCr
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#13Am I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable link shortener?
How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down?
It's a centralized service, things happen.
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#14I'm sure someone is having an interesting conversation right now. Twitter needs to stop having these embarrassing down-ages if they want to be a permanent player in the tech field.
They've had them all along. Didn't stop them from getting to where they are. Why should they start caring now? From a cost/benefit perspective, it is probably not worth it to them to do whatever is needed to have a six nines uptime.
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#15I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#16I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?
If you're a regular user it's not exposed. Links are shown with their full url on the site and the user is usually redirected before tthey have a chance to notice they're being sent through t.co
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#17I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?
Backwards compatibility.
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#18Its surprising to see that thenextweb has written such a long article about t.co being down.
i guess its easy to write up stuff :))
Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#19I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?
Twitter wants to route links through their servers for at least two reasons:
1. Analytics and monitoring. (Google's results page uses the same technique.)
2. Disabling malicious and unwanted links.Re: Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
#20I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?
If you're a regular user it's not exposed. Links are shown with their full url on the site and the user is usually redirected before tthey have a chance to notice they're being sent through t.co
It is very much exposed: The regular user can't click on links on Twitter because it's down.