Twitter Gets Mentioned 138K Times in the Last Month: Fail Whale
Published by Rodney Rumford July 1st, 2008 in twitter.Twitter is having some reliability & scaling problems. This is not news. I had maintained for a month that twitter having some problems was the best thing that ever happened to them. Thousands and thousands of bloggers complained about the problems they were experiencing; which only drove more brand awareness, more blog posts, millions of new users, engagement… and larger problems.
These boys got blogosphere coverage bigger than anything in recent memory (other than facebook perhaps). The exact number of mentions of the twitter brand in the blogosphere in the last 30 days is 138, 225. Not all of these mentions are negative. Many are very positive and just voicing frustration with the down time of the service.
Except now the jig is up, the failure novelty is wearing thin on many millions of users. They are now in serious danger of not being able to shake the unreliable wrap and might just do irreparable damage to their brand.
We will see how it all plays out in the coming months. My bet is twitter will get it right since they have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos investing in this latest round. Amazon knows a thing or 2 about creating scalable websites. 
A Twitter fan created a 3D sculpture of the twitter fail whale. The fail whale is what you see when twitter is over capacity and broken. Millions of people know this image.
When people create art around your ongoing failure it means 1 of 3 things.
1. They are too familiar with your failure mode.
2. They care enough about your brand to go create artistic sculptures. (they love you)
3. You might end up a joke on the footnote of web 2.0 start-ups that blew it.
Technorati Tags: twitter, fail whale
2 Responses to “Twitter Gets Mentioned 138K Times in the Last Month: Fail Whale”
- 1 Pingback on Jul 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 am
Correct on all counts, Rodney. It’s funny that there are so many posts today about Twitter (I keep running into them) because I was just noting how today Twitter has been working far more than usual for me.
I think you’re right that their outages of late have given them more positive value from exposure than negative value from complaints, mostly because the vast majority of twitter users are probably not “power users” and don’t miss the random features when they cut out occasionally.