Fail Whale Merchandise and Why I (Still) Love Twitter

07.08.08 | No Comments | by: Dave Jeyes

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Someone has made a page selling Fail Whale merchandise parodying the downtime issues that have been plaguing Twitter as of late. There’s even a Fail Whale page on Facebook that you can become a fan of. Twitter allows you to post short status messages or microblogs and to follow your friends’ status online or via the mobile web. Their trouble with scaling up the Twitter service is a relatively common story similar to that of Myspace or AOL during the advent of the internet. Total monthly users have quadrupled from about 500 thousand at the end of 2007 to almost 4 million in June per Compete.

Many loyal Twitter users have contemplated shifting to other status services as of late and there are quite the bevy: Friendfeed, Brightkite, Plurk and true microblogs like Tumblr and Identi.ca. Friendfeed has experienced a growth spurt as of late, possibly due to Twitter’s downtime and potentially also somewhat due to cheerleading by Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble. However, I’m not that apt to listen to figures like Calacanis wag the dog about Friendfeed while getting his back scratched by the service. Friendfeed recommends that every person that registers follow Calacanis, Scoble and a few others as soon as they sign up. This skyrockets their followers and helps to drive more traffic to their personal blogs and business ventures.

I think Nick O’Neill got to the root of the issue in his piece titled “If a Thought Leader Told You to Jump Off a Cliff.” Regardless of our frustrations with Twitter, I think it’s obvious that their is still plenty of conversation on Twitter with 4 times the number of visitors as Friendfeed. In fact, their service was started as a lifestreaming service and is likely the best way to aggregate your activity across various services on the web. However, as a status service, Twitter is still tops in my book.

fail whale shirt

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