I know, I know. Technically, it's only a fail pet if a web site uses a nice little creature on an error page announcing unplanned down-time of the service.

That makes this ASCII cow from Craigslist not really a fail pet, but I find it a nice enough idea to blog it anyway:

This little fellow shows up on the 404 error page (i.e., any page that does not exist on craigslist.org, such as this one). While it is just taken from a well-known UNIX command, I like it a lot because it goes very well with the simplicity of craigslist itself, which is intentionally so much different than all the shiny "Web 2.0" applications.

Thanks for the hint, Jabba!

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Another addition to my ever-growing fail pet collection. Today: Neatorama, a website collecting everything, well, neat.

Their "fail pet" is an octopus, the "Neatokraken":

Fail whale, make room: You've got company.

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Here's another, beautiful specimen in my little collection of what I have called "fail pets" for awhile now: Github.

Github Fail-Unicorn

I wonder if their pink fail-unicorn is somehow related to the similarly colored (but less angry) Django Pony. A distant relative, maybe -- especially since the "original" Django pony was, in fact, a unicorn.

(Before someone is urged to remind me, yes, to my knowledge, github is written in ruby, not Python/Django.)

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Instigated by Twitter's fail whale, more and more Web 2.0 companies feel the necessity to add a fail-pet to their "OMG" error pages.

I've been loosely collecting those before, so my friend Tobi was so nice to send this one from Facebook over:

Facebook: Boo Boo

I think it's from an app and not Facebook itself, but I may be wrong. Anyhow, apparently their hampster made a boo boo. That's more information than I needed, but at least it eases the pain of the failed application. And that's gotta count for something, right?

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As always, what I am writing here is my own opinion and not a statement on behalf of Mozilla Corporation.

When I was just visiting Wikipedia, I was greeted with this temporary error note (which, luckily, does not happen too often in spite of Wikipedia's huge popularity):

Wikimedia borken

And, even if this marks me as a Web 2.0 geek, I must admit: All I was thinking was -- where's the pet?

The first company to put a recognizable, even likable, "pet" onto their error pages was likely Twitter. And due to the horribly frequent outages associated with Twitter's "growing pain", we got to see the littlehuge fellow quite often. In the mean time, he seems to have swam away, at least I haven't seen him in awhile. Yet, he's not forgotten: the fail whale even has his own fanclub.

Twitter Fail Whale

Another place where I saw a "fail pet" was yelp, whose error page was sporting a picture of an actual dog, apparently the company puppy "Darwin" (sorry for the tiny screenshot):

Yelp Puppy

Now where's yours, Wikipedia?

Of course, considering I so provocatively ask this question, you might respond: Well, where's yours, Mozilla?

Here at Mozilla, we are not particularly proud of software failures, because unlike your regular web 2.0 start-up (think Twitter) where every service failure means more customers than anticipated, failures in Mozilla-land usually mean a crashed browser, (possibly) lost data and certainly frowning users*). So when the Crash Reporter icon was redesigned, we could have gone ahead and hired Foxkeh as our "crash mascot", but that would do the poor little fox wrong -- and at any rate, we prefer associating mascots with good stuff here at Mozilla. So at the time, user experience engineer Alex Faaborg made sure we don't create something too memorable, for example nothing like a second "Blue Screen of Death". Of course, had Microsoft known at the time how appeasing error messages can become with a little help from the animal kingdom, they'd have hired the entire cast of Looney Tunes to show up in their dreaded error messages.

But this might well be one of the few things we have in common with Microsoft: No fail-pets for us, any time soon.

*) On a side note, although it won't make a user fell better whose browser just crashed: When Firefox crashes it is most often due to binary, third-party plug-ins like Flash, Acrobat etc., and not due to a bug in Mozilla software -- as evidenced by the publicly available "top crashes" list and the bugs associated with it.

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