The
“Fail Whale” is an illustration of a white beluga whale held up by a
flock of birds. Originally named “Lifting a Dreamer”, it was illustrated
by Australian artist, Yiying Lu. It was used during periods of downtime
by the social networking service Twitter. When Twitter gets overloaded,
users see the above error message.
In
prehistoric period (in Silicon Valley terms: 5 years), every time any
site crashed, you would find the company bragging how its user base has
outgrown its server. Most of these never really created a penny of
revenue when this happened, however they did turn to investors to inject
more money into the system to meet the companies "urgent" cash needs.
Time have changed; Twitter and Facebook have beefed up there networks
and everything is on the cloud (at least I assume so).
As
per Twitter more than 35 million tweets went out during the FIFA world
cup Germany Brazil semifinals, breaking the previous record of 24
million held by Super Bowl. Many people enjoyed it more on Twitter than
on television. Spanish television channel, Univision, was the source to
watch the game even for many non Spanish-speaking public in the US, who
could follow a second by second account of the game over Twitter
alongside the TV visuals. With this lively, crowd-sourced Twitter stream
available, does one absolutely need TV commentary after all? Probably
not! And this provides an great marketing opportunity for Twitter!
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