Twitter chokes on plankton

I think an argument could be made that every American cell phone provider benefited from the recent outage over at Twitter.



Cell phone companies have occasionally been forced to defend their practice of charging exorbitant sums for delivering texts. It's a service that costs so close to nothing to provide that the question arises, why aren't they just charging nothing? The beauty of the free market probably has something to do with it. The important point though, is that if Twitter occasionally locks up while transferring these tiny messages, it furthers the cell company argument that those messages take up resources. That is, even if the messages are so small an Apple IIe from the 1980s would laugh at them.

I have to question how any service that exists to transfer 140-letter messages from point A to point B should not be able to handle that burden, even if the amount of messages were at an astronomically high level. The reason, of course, is that when you stream music or video, or even load CNN.com, you've received the equivalent of hundreds of those messages in just a few seconds. Maybe thousands.

The "technical difficulties" image is certainly appropriate, considering that the whale in that stylized image subsists on a steady stream of tiny things, too: plankton. I've never heard of a whale choking on plankton, though.

Man's death makes for entertainment at Tribune

Tribune did it again -- they made another death-related news story entertainment. This time it's the apparent suicide of 26-year-old Jason Kevin McCarthy at a gun range, reported in the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune paper. Note when the reference to the victim's name is first made, it's hyper-linked to the "entertainment" section of the Chicago Tribune.


For some reason only his middle and last name are hyperlinked, too. Maybe the Sentinel has a two-world limit on blue underlined text. There's clearly no limit, though, on tasteless links.