I can't decide if United Airlines is just promoting the Mile High Club on its twitter page, or if it's just an ordinary spammer hijacking their account:
(and no, you shouldn't actually enter that URL into your browser. It's boring spammy stuff.)
via @cbarrett and countless others on twitter.
Yes, yes it is. Says istwitterdown.com:
In fact, it is "too down" even to display the fail-whale. I've not seen that before :)
PS: On an unrelated side note: hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com?
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):
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.
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):
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.
photo credit: digitalbearIn the light of Sunday's free SMS frenzy at German phone company T-Mobile, I tried to set up Twitter so it sends messages to my cell phone -- considering receiving SMS is free in Germany in general, that looked like a good idea. Here is what Twitter told me after I sent the confirmation code by SMS:
Of course, they couldn't have figured out that they don't like my cell phone number before I had to send a for-pay message to their German message service.
The same thing happened to me with Twitter in the US already as well. I am a "pre-paid" customer there, and I was similarly told that I am unable to use Twitter on the phone in the US.
I seriously wonder what I've done wrong to be excluded from Twitter's phone service in two countries. What's going on?
Remember when everybody and their brother made a little website with lots of "under construction" signs and excessive use of the <blink> tag? No? Lucky you.
Of course, these times are long over, now everybody has their own blog, and facebook, and myspace, and, uhm yeah, twitter. Of course, woe is yours when you realize nobody wants to read what you had for lunch. Or dinner. Or that you went to the store and bought toilet paper (gasp! on sale!)...
But thankfully, if you have a few bucks to spare, you can always count on Google Adsense to spread the word of your oh-so-boring personal updates across the globe. Like this gentleman, who decided to show ads on people's Gmail accounts, in order to get more readers to his twitter account:
Now considering he is deeming himself an "online media" expert -- couldn't he have guessed that this kind of self-promotion is a huge cyber-turnoff?
Dear slowing economy, could you free the Internet from this and similar "SEO" annoyances in 2009, please? Probably as likely as the hell freezing over or the spammers running out of money, but one can always hope.
As I signed up for twitter during a period of "high maintenance" (that's polite for almost-constant brokenness), I encountered the fail whale quite often---and learned to like it, in its own way, because it had become a tradition of sorts, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
Twitter's Charming "mascot", the Fail Whale
And funnily, every time I visit the page in my Firefox instance, the Awesomebar keeps reminding me of the times when the whale was ubiquitous:
How nice: Nostalgia 2.0.
There used to be a time when twitter.com spammers still made an effort to disguise the fact that they're, well... spammers:
Subtle, really!
Now it has happened: As an effect of the urgent need for a weekend, I registered with twitter. Only adding people I could think of easily, I am not "following" 37 people ;)
Of course, my twitter experience started all peachy right off the bat, by first giving me site errors:
(hey, at least they are pretty)
... and then I noticed something weird about the times they show on every page:
"ungefähr 1 Stunde ago from web..." ... is that... Germenglish? Englerman?
But let's not be discouraged. They probably just started their announced maintenance window four hours early ;)
Anyone else think I forgot to "follow" them on twitter? Leave a comment.
