When’s the last time you saw the Twitter fail whale? OK, it may not have been that long ago, but something is definitely astir at the Twitter offices today. The microblogging company finally acknowledged the site’s technical difficulties, which trickled through the site and down to third party apps.

Though the problems were reportedly resolved by 11 am PST, the technical difficulties come a day after Twitter announced its new plans for shortening and wrapping shared links, adding to any existing frustration a Twitter developer (or user, for that matter) already had. Not to mention, Google Calendar had its own technical difficulties to worry about, with several sending in complaints about their disrupted day.

To that, I say, there’s always pen and paper.

However, Twitter’s betting that you don’t really care for pen and paper anymore. Shared links on the site are now being handled in-house, wit Twitter staking more claim over its empire. This is yet another case of Twitter flipping the script on users, installing a more uniform approach to a feature it left to developers when it launched years ago.

Forget Bit.ly and the rest–your Twitter sharing behavior is now being more readily monitored and presented to developers and users through its own processes. Twitter says it’s for the greater good, reducing spam and overall keeping Twitter clean. I suppose this is particularly important for Twitter, as more stats emerge on the ratio of active users to those that merely consume media.

For Twitter’s marketing components, I’d say the new link controls beef up the options the company will have moving forward, particularly through its recently launched Promoted Tweets program. Being able to track, monitor and report on link-sharing behavior is a must for Twitter’s ad network.

Reiterating Twitter’s position on its waning relationship with the developer community, Twitter is taking over more and more of the functions we once demanded from those very developers. As Twitter reveals more and more of its long-term goals around monetizing itself, its message to developers to up the ante or get out the way are being heard loud and clear.