Will the Fail Whale eat Twitter’s future?
The social media site Twitter has become huge. 100 million plus members, 30 billion posts last month. Even if you don’t tweet, it’s become an important source of real time news reporting and a way of keeping in touch with people.
But have you heard of the Fail Whale? It’s a cartoon illustration of a whale being carried through the sky by a bunch of birds. It’s what Twitter users see when the site has crashed from too much traffic. That’s been happening a lot lately.
So much so that Twitter apologized on their blog:
From a site stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October.
They say they traffic from the World Cup is partially to blame.
Seems like a good time to take stock of Twitter. It’s popular, sure, growing, it’s been around too long to be considered a fad. But what is it and what will it be? We talk with Julio Ojeda-Zapata, tech columnist for the St Paul Pioneer Press and author of Twitter Means Business and David Carr, media columnist for The New York Times.
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