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

[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 → mdonahoe]

> 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 → lloeki]

Actually...

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

The tweet response contains the full link.

[lloeki → gjulianm]

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 → lloeki]

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 → gjulianm]

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

[sodiumjoe → mdonahoe]

Which is why we shouldn't use centralized services like Twitter. I'm rooting for http://tent.io/ myself.

[digitalengineer → sodiumjoe]

However, if someone places a shortened url via tent you'd still not be able to click the link if the shorten-service is down.