Is Twitter Weighing Itself Down, or who created the Fail Whale?

This morning I logged into Twitter for what I thought would be a simple post. I came in at 102 words, incorporated a short URL into the message, as well as a few hash marks, and clicked to Tweet. Low and behold, that magic whale came up and told me "Something is technically wrong. Please try again in a moment."

Hmmmmmm, something is wrong? I waited. I clicked again. The same white whale came up. Is something wrong I asked myself? I saved my message, logged out and logged back in. Only to receive the same message. Is something wrong with me? Or is it Twitter? Is the hardware not up to the task Twitter created? Did the people behind this phenomenon underestimate the power of their own PR and media placements? Did they not read their own coverage? Or perhaps they just didn't trust it.

Well, I just could not resist. So I went to the old reliable standby - Google. I Googled "Twitter Whale." There were 8,440,000 results - and none of them good. That's more than Moby Dick gets, and he's been around a long while. I then Googled "Fail Whale" as the Twitter whale is being called by 2,450,000 sites. Hmmmmm, I think they may have started another phenomenon without even trying. I also think they could stand to learn something from the American auto industry. In fact, I think they could learn something from a book on customer experience in order to realize they have a massive problem brewing. Or has it already been over-brewed?

Don't get me wrong. It's great that Twitter was created. It's great that it grew so quickly. In many ways it has become the 21st Century version of the 1-sheet that Winston Churchill created when he told his staff never to approach him with an idea unless they could reduce it into one 8 1/2" by 11" of paper that is known as the 1-sheet so many of us rely on. Twitter forces us to put our ideas into a concise line of text that is less than 140 characters. Not so easy for many people who just love to ramble.

However, those 140 characters of brilliance [Beiber, Kutcher - are you listening?] are not worth much if they require forty-three minutes of re-clicking a "submit" button. That comes out to almost 3.4 minutes per character typed. At $100 per hour [a billing rate for most agencies], that comes out to about $5.67 per letter.

TWITTER - ARE YOU WORTH $5.67 FOR EVERY CHARACTER I TYPE?

I really don't think so. You're making newspapers seem inexpensive!

Really Twitter, I love what you've done for us. But even Kardashian is cheaper than that. And she gives good tweets.





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Think Cannon