fail whale
Latest
Twitter confirms outage was caused by 'inadvertent change'
Twitter's support page notes it is "Investigating Irregularity with Twitter APIs," that seem to have taken the site offline around 5:35 PM ET.
Twitter confirms 'on-going' site issues, millions resort to verbal communication
Sorry microbloggers -- looks like we're not fully out of the woods yet. After confirming that its users "may be experiencing issues" via its Status Blog roughly an hour ago, Twitter has added that the concerns are "on-going." Don't worry, though, engineers are on the case, so your #followfriday plans should be largely unaffected.
Google eBooks 404 page tips spear to Twitter, would make Ahab proud
That iconic "fail whale?" It was created in 2007 by an artist named Yiying Lu who had never heard of Twitter when the site grabbed the image from iStockphoto, where she'd uploaded it. The rest, of course, is history and, with the launch of Google eBooks (née Google Editions), the Googs is giving something of a tip of the hat to Twitter with its own error page -- but putting a literary spin on things. You can see the result above, a dejected man finding a decidedly non-white whale, and you don't have to be called Ishmael to catch the reference here.
wowTwitter is a Twitter just for your characters
I'm not sure how well this will scale, but it's an interesting idea: while it's certainly possible to just create a Twitter account for your World of Warcraft characters (so anyone interested can always see what you're up to), the folks behind a new site called wowTwitter have gone a step further, and recreated Twitter's functionality specifically for Azeroth's virtual denizens. It's very barebones right now, but basically, after you register, you can punch in any of your characters, "verify" them by changing something about them in the Armory (like unequipping the piece of gear on your wrist), and then you can send and receive messages on that character, with special channels created for the guild, your realm, and so on. I thought it used Twitter somehow, but it seems completely separate: they're running their own database and servers, so while the two work the same way (there are "@" replies and hashtags), they don't interact at all.Which means they'll also have all of the problems that Twitter has had -- when only a few people are using your database, it runs fine, but if it starts to scale up at all, then you run into lots of "Fail Whale" downtime. And I'm not sure we need a whole other system just for WoW characters (though this one does have the nice bonus of "claiming" your character so it can't get impersonated). At any rate, they're in beta right now, and actually hosting a cash money prize contest for the most characters verified and tweets posted, so a link from us will probably show them how ready their system is. If it's your thing, go forth and wowTweet!
