TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service’s Risks
The original headline for this post was “TinyURL OUtage SHows Fragility of the Web” – synecdoche to the n-th degree, yes indeed. TinyURL’s outage doesn’t expose even a single point of failure in the web, it just exposes the consequence of single influence, regardless of success or failure. Power-law at work.
Damn, dude, you’ve linked to a fair number of my posts around the web now and every one of them has been to mock me!
Don’t know what I did to deserve it, other than being a goober, I suppose. (Note that I would rather be a goober than a pedant, though, and that’s a “synecdoche” to say the least!)
In truth, I’m not so sure the original title was incorrect. If linking is the currency of the web but many permalinks are too long to work with modern methods of communication (email, twitter, etc) and if thus people flock to the best known, centralized solution – a simple redirect – and THAT breaks, then I think a big part of the whole web is at issue.