Twitter: When even failure is successful

While Twitter still remains the king of the life feed with FriendFeed trailing slowly behind, the legendary Twitter Fail Whale has become a meme in and of itself as new member growth leads to frequent service downtime.

Illustrator Yiying Lu first created "Lifting Up a Dreamer" and uploaded it to iStock Photo in March 2007. Twitter is believed to have licensed the image for about $10 USD in Spring 2008 and it has since been remixed in a variety of different ways.

THE EVOLUTION

I can think of much worse scenarios than having a huge influx of new users take down my company's servers. For most new startups, employees are happy to have any users at all. In Twitter's case, they've got a meme spin-off of their outages, including a full fledged fan club.

According to the Wikipedia article, Sean O'Steene registered Failwhale.com in late May 2008 in an effort to "poke fun at the folks that take online social network downtime a little too seriously."

The site features links to merchandise, a Fail Whale vacation album, and a label design contest for a mythical Fail Whale Pale Ale. Fail Whale is obviously the new LOLrus.

BEING COOL, JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE
In eighth grade a ninth grade boy asked me if I was taking the bus into Vancouver for the all-ages Rascalz show at the Sogo Cafe. I replied with an enthusiastic "I am now", only to find out that the cafe did not exist and that I was a "poser" when it came to hip hop. It was a scarring experience for someone so fully invested in being cool. By ninth grade I was far too jaded to care about cool hunting or about tormenting others. Grunge had turned all of us into apathetic know-it-alls.

Which brings me to the Fail Whale...Is it possible that the Fail Whale is a meme propagated by adult nerds in an effort to create an exclusive insider clique? If the service is so bad then why aren't we closing our accounts? My theory is that we secretly relish in mocking the Fail Whale, because we were the ones that helped make it huge.

FIRSTS
On Thursday I returned to my old watering hole only to find it packed with hip legging-adorned trashettes and serving a specialty hefeweizen. While I love that the local Taqueria is making money, I also feel a sense of loss because I found it first. We're looking at the same principles here. Being cool means being a pioneer, whether this is your corner of the smoke pit, your beer stained watering hole, your hacker event, your ironic post-punk clown show, or your mobile micro-blogging community. The Fail Whale jokes let others know we are weathered veterans and have been around long enough to remember a time when there were far fewer outages. This meme isn't about rectifying a service (that can be done in private emails and volunteer coding), this is about asserting alpha-cool dominance. To quote Mule Design's popular shirt, "Fail Whale eats [our] balls" and we freaking love talking about it.

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Twitter: When even failure is successful

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