Embedded: Twitter puts outage
Hide and seek. Did I scare you?
Earlier this week, Twitter went down. It went down hard. It was scary. I know because I was there. I now officially have the PTSD. At last, I’m finally somebody.
The duration of the outage was about 45 minutes. That’s approximately twice the amount of time Apollo 13 spent out of radio contact when it was behind the moon. I just got a double dose of what it must have felt like to be in Mission Control. And I’m a non-smoker!
It was the longest outage since Twitter’s IPO and the second crash in the last nine days.
The outage was described in the strongest possible terms as the “longest outage since the IPO.” What those two things have to do with each other I have absolutely no idea.
Some in the media took the opportunity to write quippish jokes about the mayhem. (Hint: It was too soon.) Jokes, I must say, that practically wrote themselves.
- “Twitter Suffers Outage During Biz Stone’s Panel at SXSW” – I don’t know what a “Biz Stone” is but I bet it was pissed. Source: WSJ.
- “Twitter Outage Takes Site Down for 45 Minutes, Users Stranded” – I bet a lot of them were forced to hitchhike. Source: Newsmax.com.
- “Twitter goes down, chaos and productivity ensue” – What the fuck are you implying? Source: Washington Post.
- “‘We Experienced Unexpected Complications’: The Language Of Twitter Outages” – Hey, that’s the hip new lingo. Source: Lifehacker Australia.
- “Twitter Goes Down: Something is Technically Wrong” – You have a firm grasp of the obvious. Souce: The Next Web.
- “Twitter Briefly Goes Down, Silencing Millions Of Horrible, Unnecessary Twitter Jokes” – That hurts, that really hurts. Source: Huffington Post.
Again, as your intrepid embedded reporter, I was there on the front lines. What follows are my eyewitness firsthand accounts of the action as it unfolded.
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YouTube skunked my prattle clip
It was a dark and stormy <embedded video>.
Yeah, that sounds good. Another blog post off to a great start. Sometimes only a video will suffice. Har.
So the other day I went and embedded an internet video and made it the sole content of a blog post. Oh, that is so creative! And I foolishly didn’t include any kind of preamble. I simply let the video speak for itself.
One of the best ways for a writer to deal with an empty blog space that is actively mocking them is to go somewhere else, presumably where they aren’t completely devoid of talent, type CTRL-C, then come back and type CTRL-V. Now that is writing!
Sometimes I just can’t help myself. I’ll find a video that I think is the bee’s knees and/or I’m just feeling lazy and insipid. Or that monster known as “time” has dined on my ass for lunch. For whatever reason I decide to take the easy way out. It’s time to recycle some content.
Do it, though, and YouTube just might get the last laugh. I’ve tried to come up with a sniglet to describe this phenomenon and got nothin. Let’s call it videosnook.
videosnook – an unappetizing or non-representative “thumbnail” or “preview” static frame of an embedded video clip, usually one that dramatically discourages viewing.
Example usage:
“The other day I posted a video of a really cool song but got videosnooked hard when YouTube chose a picture from the video that said KERRY’S GAY, even though the video has absolutely nothing to do with that! Therefore I don’t think anyone watched the video and the posting didn’t get any comments.”
Quick! Someone dial 9-1-1 for the whambulance. 🙂
If you ignored the video because of that damn screenshot and are willing to give it a second chance, read on…
It’s a song called “Garbage” that I originally heard on Saturday Night Live way back on April 17, 1976. The lyrics stuck with me all these years and the other day I googled them. Lo and behold someone had made a video for another version of the song as recently as 2008. Sadly I couldn’t find the original SNL footage.
It’s worth a listen, especially if you liked the Story of Stuff web site. It’s sort of in that same vein.
Click here for my post entitled Rockin’ the Garbage.
Shouts from the Abyss 
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