Well, guess what? the “.ly” in bit,ly stands for Libya, owner of that top-level domain. Yes, protesters sending news on a killing in Tripoli or a tactical message about a government tank column were sending messages through their [Libya’s] servers.
Well this tops it all. Tweets need to be brief – 140 characters worth. URLs can be very long so to facilitate twitter, companies off url shortening services.
For instance my blog url is located at https://suptweet.wordpress.com/ and is shortened to http://tiny.cc/r2e2x, from 30 to 20 characters using tiny.cc.
The most popular is bit.ly which also works seamlessly with all the twitter add-ons etc. And until a few minutes ago, I unconsciously used it. And so did thousands of tweets about the uprising spreading across Islam’s world.
Well, guess what? the “.ly” in bit,ly stands for Libya, owner of that top-level domain. Yes, protesters sending news on a killing in Tripoli or a tactical message about a government tank column were sending messages through their [Libya’s] servers.
I signed up with an account at tiny.cc (Cocos Islands) and the article link will tell you of more benign url shortening services. You might try that, too.
Here’s an Unlike.ly Tale: Gadhafi Does Swimming.ly on the Internet – WSJ.com.
U.S. Capitol SOTU eve, 2011 - photo Russ Imrie
Russell Imrie is a sometimes content producer, webmaster and an American Indian self-styled social critic now living in the Washington DC area. 1.My earlier blog on evolving social networking and its political power 2. on the blogging phenomenon and classic [print] journalism. This is to say nothing about social networking. I tweet at tweedyBard. Copyright by Russell Imrie forever.
