Twitter's down and there's no way to tweet/retweet about it

Enters paradox. 

An overwhelming majority of netizens have gotten used to sharing and discussing the latest information and trends through Twitter, the most popular English language microblogging site (there's the Chinese version if you're wondering why "English language" needs to be emphasized). Now that there's a very compelling event to talk about—the site's own absence—it's beyond reach.

Twitter fails to load on any browser, client, or app as of posting time and there are no explanations yet regarding the outage. The noteworthy online platform for instantaneously sharing information couldn't facilitate the dissemination of details on why it's offline. Several news agencies have already contacted the Twitter admin for an explanation or announcement but an official answer is yet to be released.

Twitter only offers this brief post on its blog:

Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

This is not the first time that Twitter has suffered an outage and as usual, the mob Internet lurkers are anxious to get an explanation or to have the site back.

Google readily presents the service Downrightnow on top of its results page for those who are turning to the search engine for an answer. Downrightnow lets users know whether a site is globally (translation: really/absolutely/totally) down or just down for certain users.

Well, on the bright side. Companies may expect some temporary increase in productivity in the next few minutes (or some hours hopefully). There may be also less bullying, nonsensical arguments, gossips, propaganda, and ranting on the Internet for the short period the site is absent.

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UDPATE

Well, the site's now up and running again. The "in the next few minutes (or some hours hopefully)" I was mentioning couldn't really be that long.


image from Troy Janisch 

Hate a website‽ Kick Ass and blast it away

There are websites you just love to hate. It could be due to the incessant ads, stupid or partial content, poor usability, or malicious presentations. There's the comment box to abuse when you want your two cents heard but sometimes, it does not suffice. Whatever it is in a web page that's bothering you, expressing all your accumulated disgust and repulsion can now be done more expressively with the help of Kick Ass.

Kick Ass is a browser bookmarklet designed to "destroy" websites. It is a game that allows Internet surfers to take a break and "wipe out" particularly annoying pages with the help of video game spaceships that fire blasters and bombs.

Of course, "destroying" here is only virtual. Kick Ass only creates a copy of the appearance of the website with all its elements converted into game items that can be blasted off. Playing Kick Ass can be addicting as it can be easily played by simply adding the bookmarklet (from the site) to the bookmarks bar on your browser. You only need to log in with your social networking account (or you can create an account at the site) and start playing with your cursor movement keys and space bar.

Screenshot:

Some Internet surfing tips

For those with slow Internet connection, do it the .mobi way.

Look for a website's mobile device optimized version. The Yahoo! and Google search engines, for example, have their respective .mobi or mobile device optimized pages.

Try these:

For messaging (Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, MSN, etc)
Try eBuddy Mobile. Copy this link to your browser http://www.ebuddy.com/mobile

For reference (Answers.com is for me the best comprehensive online reference so this link should be enough)
Try Mobile Answers.com. Copy this link to your browser http://mobile.answers.com/

For web searches
Try Google Mobile in this link http://www.google.com/m
or Yahoo! Mobile by following this link http://m.yahoo.com/

Sorry for not giving you the instant hyperlinks. That's intended as I still have to share another tip (for Firefox users). Highlight those (supposedly) links or the items in blue text and drag them to a tab or to the space beside a tab in the Firefox window. The links will be instantly loaded by doing that. This trick also works for hyperlinks and some plain texts.