Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.
"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."
Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," Twitter's error message featuring a cartoon whale, earlier on Monday. It may have been more noticeable than usual because of the day's status as "Cyber Monday," a big day for holiday e-commerce deals--which in this day and age means plenty of people hunting on retailers' Twitter accounts for fire-sale promotions.
Obviously, amid all the seasonal shopaholism, somebody forgot to feed the whale.
But did it Twitter?
Whenever Twitter's servers take a tumble--which, longtime users undoubtedly recall, used to be pretty frequently--the microblogging service brings up an image of a whale being lifted out of the water by a flock of birds. The creation of designer Yiying Lu, the "fail whale" has become pretty much iconic among Web geeks.
But the official blog of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass., has informed us all that the word "twitter" was associated with whales long before Evan Williams and Biz Stone were dealing with customer complaints, sort of like how "muggles" was pothead slang decades before "Harry Potter" came along.
"Twitter," believe it or not, once referred to an obscure piece of sperm whale anatomy that was typically only encountered when whalers were chopping up one of the unfortunate creatures.
The Whaling Museum dug up an old document called "Report of the Commissioner for the year ending June 30, 1902: Aquatic products in arts and industries: fish oils, fats, and waxes. Fertilizer from aquatic products," which we assume must've been absolutely fascinating reading. On page 197, the term "twitter" is explained (in way more than 140 characters): it's a "thread-like or membranous substance ranging through the contents of the case...from 2 to 3 inches thick, glutinous, and extremely tough" in the head of a sperm whale. You know, like Moby Dick.
The document continues: "In decapitating the sperm whale, especially in severing near the bunch of the neck, a very sharp spade is required to cut through this tough and elastic formation. Although it is very difficult to manipulate, an economical whaleman never throws this substance away." Um, that sounds kind of horrible and gross. I'll take the more recent definition of "twitter" any day.
(NB: I stumbled upon this thanks to a link from a Twitter account that claims to be written by the massive whale hanging on the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.)
The Fail Whale ate your Twitter user icon for lunch and now it's too heavy to lift.
(Credit: Twitter)Twitter has been hiccuping all day, it seems. Earlier, some users (myself included) noticed occurrences of the service's notorious "fail whale"--the cartoon that pops up when Twitter's servers are overloaded--and later, some members began to report that their profile pictures had disappeared and were replaced by Twitter's default icon.
As they say at Fark, everybody panic!
Well, not really. Twitter CEO Evan Williams acknowledged the issue, saying "if you're missing your icon/avatar, please excuse -- will be back shortly!" in a Twitter post. As of Monday afternoon, some of them are still MIA, and Twitter hasn't said what the exact issue is. But, from what it sounds like, the avatars are not gone forever.
The irony? I navigated to Williams' profile page shortly after 4 p.m. PT, and his own avatar was down. Maybe it was just for solidarity.
Twitter's outage problems were notorious in its early days, regularly downing its servers and spawning rumors that hardware issues had led to the ouster of one of its top engineers. Major outages are now rare at Twitter.
Update: We wanted to note that the "fail whale" art was created by Yiying Lu.
Greenpeace might want to save the whales, but it's not above giving them silly names.
The legendary environmental organization, as part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition campaign, is tracking humpback whales in the South Pacific via satellite tags and hoping to gather data that will help protect them from hunting. To humanize the massive cetaceans a bit, Greenpeace International is also holding a whale-naming competition in the form of an online poll. It appears, looking at the site, that a number of "winning" names will go to the array of whales being tracked.
Looks like one humpback whale's going to be making a real splash.
(Credit: Greenpeace)Among the 30 finalists, which were chosen from over 11,000 submitted, are names like Cian ("ancient" or "enduring" in Irish), Anahi ("immortal" in Persian), Kigai ("strong spirit" in Japanese) and Humphrey (after that whale who could've used GPS). There's also "Mister Splashy Pants," which appears to have been included among the other 29 names as an "oh, what the heck" entrant.
We're not sure if Greenpeace actually expected anyone to choose it among the list of sweet and profound ethnic monikers, but "Mister Splashy Pants" is currently swimming away with a whopping 68 percent of the vote.
The lesson stands true: When it comes to online polls, expect the unexpected.
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