

Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down - psobot
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/10/08/twitters-t-co-is-currently-down-meaning-all-links-shortened-by-the-social-network-are-not-working/?utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_campaign=social%20media&awesm=tnw.to_l5M0&utm_source=Twitter

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mseebach
I 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?

~~~
kcl
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.

~~~
guelo
Google search does not use the same technique.

~~~
damncabbage
What's the difference?

* User browses on Twitter, clicks link in tweet pointing to t.co, is redirected off to the page where they wanted to go.

* User searches on Google, clicks link in search result pointing to google.com, is redirected off to the page where they wanted to go.

Admittedly it only happens with half of the search results of the first page
(I think; it seems to vary), but it's very much the same technique.

~~~
kcl
If he was not misled by the false "on hover" representation of the link in his
address bar, then its possible he means:

1\. That Twitter uses a "short link" where Google uses some kind of (I trust)
token-secured "open redirect"

or

2\. That Google uses a {Javascript, 301, ...} redirect where Twitter uses a
{Javascript, 301, ...} redirect.

Depending on what User-agent I sent, I got Twitter to variously return a
Javascript or 301 Moved Permanently response. I could only get Google to
return a Javascript response to cURL, but I did not try hard, and I would not
rule out Google employing different redirect methods, particularly on their
search results page. Google is notorious for falling back to different methods
depending on the particulars of the client. See:

[http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/12/velocity-
forcing...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/12/velocity-forcing-gzip-
compression/)

So they at least both use the Javascript method. In any event, if you mod out
the content of the hyperlink after the domain, and mod out the content of the
text based HTTP response (!), which is fair here, then the methods are all
equivalent, and all generate the same server diagrams.

In this case, there is not much difference between the browser parsing
plaintext in HTTP headers that tells it to go to a different site and the
browser parsing plaintext in an HTTP body that tells it to go to a different
site once executed in a Javascript engine.

~~~
guelo
How does the fake link hover work? With Javascript turned off the first time I
hover over a link I see the google redirect url but the second time I hover I
see the fake url.

~~~
hrrsn
<a href="<http://www.fakehover.com>
onclick="window.location='[http://www.goto.com/>](http://www.goto.com/>); I
presume.

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mdonahoe
Am 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.

~~~
lloeki
> _Am I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable
> link shortener?_

Yes.

> _How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down?_

This is different because if I read a tweet cached in my client or archived
somewhere I can't reach an external resource because a middleman is down.

> _It's a centralized service, things happen._

The WWW is decentralized by design. Link shorteners, and reliance on them,
make it obnoxiously centralized. The tweet itself should contain the full link
and shorten it only on display [0] [1].

[0] <https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783814>

[1] <https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783881>

~~~
gjulianm
Actually...

<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-entities>

The tweet response contains the full link.

~~~
lloeki
Interesting.

So, why is (apparently) everyone — including Twitter — sending us through
t.co?

Example here[0] where you can see Twitter displays "mlkshk.com/r/K29L.jpeg" in
the tweet, downright lies to you when hovering over it with
"<http://mlkshk.com/r/K29L.jpeg> while the real href is
<http://t.co/fqxnG84t>.

So, WWW broken.

[0] <https://twitter.com/xkcdrss/status/255158017253838848>

~~~
gjulianm
I imagine that Twitter sends you through t.co for tracking and analytics
purposes. But a lot of Twitter clients just send you to the full URL.

(By the way, I have to check if Twitter forbids bypassing t.co shortened URLs
in third party clients).

EDIT: As I supposed, the display requirements say that the clients should send
the user through t.co <https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements>

~~~
jaggederest
And that's why we should be mad at twitter. Sorted.

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arcatek
When a HN twitter bot has tweeted this story, I actually clicked on the link.

Genius.

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

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farms
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."

:)

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dm8
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.

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generj
I'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.

~~~
beagle3
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.

~~~
x5315
We care. We're working on it.

~~~
dylanhassinger
Appreciate the responsiveness. But forcing us to use your link shortener does
not send a message of "we care"

~~~
x5315
What I meant was that we care about uptime, and we're working on improving
that.

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panacea
And nothing of value... /snark

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jmathai
Thankfully the Internet has a pretty short term memory.

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Mithrandir
Seems to be back up: <https://t.co/uHJO6BCr>

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stevewilhelm
For most Twitter's users, it is not a mission critical service.

It could be regularly down for hours at a time with little to no effect.

They'll just come back later.

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jqueryin
Internal sources say t.co went down due to registrar error, which is highly
unfortunate for Twitter as this was something out of their control.

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avallark
Its surprising to see that thenextweb has written such a long article about
t.co being down.

i guess its easy to write up stuff :))

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tomflack
Related: OSX twitter integration seems broken for me? I can't tweet from
Safari or other apps.

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chumpZero
I dont think its controlling satellites - its twitter...everybody chill

