This stock licenced image ( a $5-10 fee) , an illustration by Yiying Lu, is the image you see when Twitter is down. It is called the “Fail Whale” and has moved as a meme into early adopter culture in a big way:

Wikipeda currently redirects searches to find information to the Fail Whale to the Twitter entry. Sensitive!

Using Compete.com, Garry Jenkin looked at Twitter’s analytics and saw that in April users had increased 42% and over 1,000% for the year. That’s some big time uptake.

BuzzFeed has a mass of links to follow including these:

• Fail Whale, the Fan Club- failwhale.com
• Fail Whale, the Gear- zazzle.com
• Fail Whale on Wikipedia
• What Twitter Users Are Saying -summize.com

Is the whale an endangered species? The Guardian’s article last week”Twitter searches for the next step” mentions that “now might be a good time to grab one, before the fail whale swims out of sight for good.”

And really does it matter? Does it matter that a new technology is fragile and falls over through massive uptake? You can only be let down by something that you have already given your expectations to…

It reminds me of a great quote from the late great Randy Pausch:

When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under digital, pop culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.