Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down

Looks like a DNS failure, so adding 199.59.148.12 to your hosts file gives you working t.co links again.

Thankfully the Internet has a pretty short term memory.

I find my Twitter useless now (although I can still copy links). It's amazing to see how Twitter has become my information/discovery network. I use Facebook just to browse pictures and other casual stuff shared by my friends/family.

Twitter can kill Flipboard and other tons of "discovery engines" with one flip. I think Twitter has figured out this stuff couple of years back and that's what they are doing. A real-time discovery network. It is more powerful than any of the existing old mediums, be it newspapers or TV networks.

EDIT: It also makes extremely powerful advertising medium.

It's also listed in Spamhaus http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co - so it could be someone's filter going nuts over that.

Funny recommendation there:

"If you are an authoritative administrator of t.co and you have solved the abuse issues you can write to us at dbl-mmxi@spamhaus.org from either abuse@t.co or postmaster@t.co and inform us of the actions you have taken to clean up the current spammer URLs. Please also inform us of any steps you have taken to prevent future abuse of your shortener/redirector. We will review your request and, at our discretion, remove the listing or respond to your request."

:)