I Would Pay To Make The Fail Whale Go Away
I am frustrated… I am irked. It is not because:
-I did not get to go camping tonight
-My cats want to go in and out at all hours
-My Internet does not ever seem to work right
-or that AT&T still drives me nuts
It is because I.. WE still get that evil smiling whale on Twitter.
Why, after being in business since late August 2006 the site seems to still go down?
I do not get it. I mean, look, most sites are up all the time. Right? How often does Facebook go down? Facebook does have about 2 years on Twitter, but for the most part it did not really launch till 2006 as well. Heck even MySpace is up, but that may be do to LACK of traffic. Heck, even Plurk is up.. 
With so much money coming at Twitter, Press Coverage and being the backbone of Social Networking, why is it not more stable? I am by no means a programmer, engineering or such, but I would think they would put some serious time, money and effort into making the site more stable.
Is there any other company that has gotten such familiarity of its logo showing its offline? Right.. we know the Fail Whale as much as we know the Twitter logo! It is crazy.
I would pay, yes PAY a small fee for the use of Twitter, if I knew it would increase the up-time of the site. It is worth it to me to know that I can count on the site to be up when I need it.
Would you be willing to pay for Twitter?
John Knight
1 year ago
I agree with you, I too would pay a small amount to increase the uptime of a site that is so popular and so instrumental in communications. Nice write-up.
davepeck
1 year ago
Thanks!
OmegaZxA
1 year ago
I'm not actually the kind of guy willing to pay for it.
As I've been researching the later months, Peck, I noticed that Twitter's power has turned against itself.
Why do we see so many Fail Whales, sufficing to a flock? I can tell you: people just stopped using everything to use Twitter.
The little bird was intended to act as some sort of "live microblogging", as we can see for its motto: "What are you doing NOW?". However, what we see at this moment at the still early life of the avian is that it's been turned into a massive multi-person instant messaging chat.
Yep, people don't make the right use of the service.
Why can't people use Twitter as they use 4Square?
The conversations they have going on Twitter are so important that they should be left public?
What will be of MSN, ICQ, Y!messenger, GTalk, Skype and all the others that are seeming to become neglected in the near future?
Maybe I'm about to blog about it.
davepeck
1 year ago
Blog away! Look forward to reading what you have to say about it!
Mark Wilson
1 year ago
In a way, I'm with you in that I would pay as small amount for Twitter. The trouble is that most people woudn't, which means they would leave Twitter and go elsewhere, meaning I would be paying for a service that was no-longer required. It's a vicious circle.
If Twitter can monetise a different way, maybe they can increase reliability!
davepeck
1 year ago
Your right most people would not pay, that would be a problem. Maybe they can roll out Paid services or such, which in turn would require them to add reliability. That being said it is better then it was a few years ago
Mark Wilson
1 year ago
Sorry for the duplicate post Dave… seemed to have some issues leaving a comment on this site (OpenID authentication combined with no obvious sign of success or comments awaiting moderation). Hope it wasn't anything offensive though – as you seem to have deleted them both!
davepeck
1 year ago
Dang.. I did not mean to delete both.. there was actually 3! Im sorry
davepeck
1 year ago
I got it back!
Tweets that mention I Would Pay To Make The Fail Whale Go Away -- Topsy.com
1 year ago
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave Peck and Dr Bex LewisNever re, John Knight. John Knight said: RT @davepeck: I Would Pay To Make The Fail Whale Go Away http://bit.ly/a5357i [...]
OmegaZxA
1 year ago
Gotta make a multilingual post on my blog for this occasion #feelingimportant
tgsanchez
1 year ago
I'd pay if it meant >99% uptime, but that's a BIG IF. With over $160 million in funding (if i remember correctly) I don't believe money is the issue. I would guess the underlying architecture of the system was not built to handle the load it currently supports.
What I would be more willing to pay money for is the option to exclude 4square updates in my twitter stream. Freaking annoying. I don't care that you're the mayor of some coffee shop (that you work at) in Buffalo. Really, I dont.
davepeck
1 year ago
Okay..4sq comment is fricking funny..
WLco
1 year ago
I agree w Mark W & TGSanchez – Twitter (and I hope they're reading this) has ZERO respect for its users. The site crashes, gets stuck in limbo, posts/followers disappear on a 24/7 basis. Their technical flaws have literally forced us to use 3rd party platforms to make Twitter livable. As a business tweeter I would gladly pay for ENHANCED SERVICES – like no more useless 2K caps, or 10 searches, some degree of real time interface with a Help Desk, enhanced ability to customize or create more detailed profiles, increased search functions, etc. But why should we pay to help them get their act together! They have the funding – but that nasty whale shows up more than ever. Twitter needs to improve its analytics for business users- because it is still hard to measure ROI for the amount of time, labor and learning curve that Twitter requires. It is getting harder to monetize Twitter activities for businesses too – because it is far too labor intensive to really be profitable. Do you charge per Tweet? per hour? per month? It's hard to get a handle on it. Plus the numbers of users they claim is bogus – check out the users who have not posted for a month, 6 mos, a year or more? Its off the charts and more drop out by the minute – is it from sheer frustration? brain drain? or uncertainty of the real value? Bigger minds than mine will need to figure all this out.
SEOKudos
1 year ago
I Would Pay To Make The Fail Whale Go Away…
Kudos for a great SEO article – Trackback from SEOKudos…
dbbradle
1 year ago
If I knew it would increase uptime, I'd be willing to pay. However, that's not the case. Throwing money at Twitter won't decrease downtime. They wrote a good blog post about why there's been more downtime than usual and what they're doing to fix it: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/whats-happening-w…