Twitter Sleeps with the Fishes

    God forgive me but that's what I think whenever I see this screen.

    Comments and faves

    1. ★

      Creative Sage™, billsoPHOTO, dilellaedwards, Mykl Roventine, and 40 other people added this photo to their favorites.

    2. anjibee (61 months ago | reply)

      you nut!

      i was trying to figure out what it represents myself. the birds are, i suppose, tweets, but what does the smiling whale stand for? the weight of their overburdened system?

    3. scriptingnews (61 months ago | reply)

      Thanks!

      That's one of the nicest things anyone has said to me today. :-)

    4. Mykl Roventine (61 months ago | reply)

      This image drives me crazy. I know I'm already angry when I see it, but I can't get over how wrong it feels. Those birds have no business carrying that poor whale. I've designed my own alternate version if you're interested.

    5. kosso (61 months ago | reply)

      I saw a really funny comment earlier from Jeremiah Owyang about this image :

      Part of Twitter's problem is that a few of the birds are flying the WRONG WAY! :)

    6. allen074 (61 months ago | reply)

      you know what we should do - declare monday as fish icon day - and everyone change their icon to the fish icon you have above :)

    7. ravidor (61 months ago | reply)

      Actually I think it is more sophisticated then that.
      This is obviously an allegoric illustration.
      Sigmund Freud would have a field day here.

      So, what do we have here?
      A whale.
      The whale is smiling.
      The whale eyes are closed.
      The whale is sleeping.
      The whale is dreaming.
      the whale tail is raised in the air (the tail looks like a mustache).
      The whale is air born, carried by ropes held in the beaks of eight red birds, four facing to the left and four facing to the right.
      The whale is carried above a red sea, the red sea has Sharpe waves in it (it looks to me like a bread knife).

      Home work:
      Please answer the questions below:

      1) Is the whale happy? If yes, why?
      2) What is the meaning of the whale tail?
      3) What does the whale dream?
      4) What does the whale represents?
      5) Why are the birds red?
      6) Why are four birds facing to the left and four facing to the right?
      7) Why are the birds lifting the whale?
      8) What do the birds represents?
      9) What does the ropes represents?
      10) Why is the sea red?
      11) Why does the sea looks like a knife?
      12) What does the sea represents?

      Good luck!

    8. billsoPHOTO (61 months ago | reply)

      Heh! I just don't get this graphic... or Twitter's plan. Go down every weekend? What sort of system is that, anyway?

    9. RL_ELO (61 months ago | reply)

      Not sure I see the reason for the whale either. This is not a new and unknown situation. A potted petunia would be much more appropriate.

    10. michaeljamespinto (61 months ago | reply)

      If you made that into a t-shirt I'd buy it!

    11. Barbara KB (61 months ago | reply)

      Has anyone named the Twitter whale yet? Moby it ain't...

    12. rexhammock (61 months ago | reply)

      The whale's name is obvious - Scoby Dick.

    13. bradleyjp (61 months ago | reply)

      The whale's name is Luca.

    14. susan.beebe (61 months ago | reply)

      That whale looks way too friggin happy to be in an outage! WTF?!

    15. Jeff McNeill (61 months ago | reply)

      Fail Whale!

    16. 704 Race (61 months ago | reply)

      The whale is being pulled from the ocean. It's minutes away from dying ;(

    17. JL! (61 months ago | reply)

      FAIL WHALE is genius!

    18. allaboutgeorge (61 months ago | reply)

      Well played, ravidor, well played.

    19. Civixen (61 months ago | reply)

      Biz just tweeted a link to this pic! FAIL Whale is famous! twitter.com/biz/statuses/823774824

    20. Vincent X (61 months ago | reply)

      Someone I know just made some Fail Whale t-shirts:

      zazzle.com/bluebird7

      I'm ordering mine!

    21. brewcitybrand (61 months ago | reply)

      I think it's a great graphic. I can see some of the critiques, and some of the frustration due to the technical issues lately...but...the graphic is pristine, fresh, and intriguing.

      Who was the designer?

    22. SeanI.am (60 months ago | reply)

      I love the Fail Whale! I'm starting a fan club:

      failwhale.com

    23. John Rees (60 months ago | reply)

      Consider adding this to my group
      www.flickr.com/groups/twittererrors/

    24. Frederick Van Johnson (60 months ago | reply)

      the whale isn't smiling, I think it's been embalmed.

    25. Dread Pirate Roberts (60 months ago | reply)

      I took a shot at making my own fail whale awhile ago.

    26. Ben and Kristin Carcio (60 months ago | reply)

      Greenpeace objects to the new illegal whaling technique, they're calling it "seagull string whaling"

    27. ojtibi (59 months ago | reply)

      @ravidor maybe those are the questions we should ask Yiying Lu. :D

      On the other hand, if Twitter was running on MySQL, shouldn't they have designed something with Sakila the Dolphin in it?

    28. Shovelling Son (59 months ago | reply)

      Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Twitter Over Capacity, and we'd love to have this added to the group!

    29. Jym Dyer (59 months ago | reply)

      =v= Save the whales! Ban driftnetting!

    30. TuneFish (58 months ago | reply)

      I understood the meaning of this. I study hypnosis, and this image is supposed to hypnotize you by being totally meaningless.

    31. John Rees (58 months ago | reply)

      Someone I know has immortalized the failwhale in a tattoo

    32. YEAH_522 (23 months ago | reply)

      Its not immortalized, the person will die. and their flesh will rot.

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