From Fail Whales to real-time Twitterball

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!