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What a mess
By Dave Winer on Saturday, December 31, 2011 at 2:07 PM.

A picture named houseOfCards.gifEarlier I reported that Twitter was down just as I was publishing two big pieces. Then things got worse. The URL shortener we use that runs behind r2.ly went down too. So you were doubly-blocked by a creaky infrastructure that I was actually writing about in one of the pieces that didn't get through. #

It's poetry in motion. Actually non-motion.  #

People worry about SOPA, but you should also worry about the house-of-cards we've built around Twitter. We seriously need to simplify things. The people at Twitter need to hear this. A simple change in their software, that moves the link out of the 140 characters would completely obviate the need for shorteners, and allow us to remove a whole level of brittleness in the infrastructure.  #

It's always been this way, and the problem has persisted for years. They store a lot of metadata with each tweet, so there's clearly no reason their infrastructure would have any trouble at all supporting it. #

Anyway, I temporarily switched to bit.ly, so the blork.ly address we use here is likely to work. As long as bit.ly is up. #

Heh. What a mess. #




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