14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is a lot of things but a technology powerhouse is not one of them. The site is constantly struggling with downtime, outages and bugs. The latest fun bug, which has been plugged in the meantime, enabled users to post tweets that were longer than 140 characters, as much as several thousands characters long.
The bug, which involved Twitter’s t.co URL shortener, allowed users to post tweets of an arbitrary length, bypassing Twitter’s character limit and check. It was exploited quite a few times, while the bug was still active, with one user tweeting the entire first chapter of the book of Genesis, which you may be familiar with from the Bible.
It worked by manipulating the Twitter Share URL. Users had to paste or write a portion of text after “http://twitter.com/share?url=” where the URL to be shortened would normally be placed.
The shortener treated the text as an URL and didn’t do any length check on it. However, the tweets were then displayed in full on the Twitter.com site. In many third-party apps, for mobile or desktop, or on other sites, the long tweets failed to display properly.
Twitter has fixed the bug in the meantime and tweets will display properly now. While the bug itself is harmless and the people exploiting it were doing it simply out of curiosity, it does highlight a deeper issue at Twitter.
The site has been notorious for its bugs and instabilities. The dreaded Fail Whale is a common sight, even now. During the World Cup the service struggled to stay up.
In fact, for many years, the constant struggle to make the site scale and keep up with growth, prevented the team from focusing on anything else. Only recently has Twitter started to build its own features and functionality, things that had been covered by third-parties so far.
And even when it does that, things don’t always work out, as the recently launched Tweet Button managed to ‘break’ several websites that implemented it, over the weekend.