Klauss Gerhardt, the abstract artist and long-time failure, known simply as “Klauss,” loves when Twitter gets so bogged down with traffic that he can't post a message. It allows him the opportunity to, “see the beauty that is the fail whale.” Twitter's "fail whale," a giant whale being lifted out of an ocean by a small flock of tweeting birds, appears when the site is overrun, and is so popular it's on T-shirts and even tattoos. The icon -- which Twitter users call the "fail whale" because the creature appears only when the site has failed to load -- has gained a cult following as the social media site grows at breakneck pace.
Twitter, which lets users post 140-character micro-blogs, saw a 1,374 percent jump in unique visitors between February 2008 and February this year, up to 7 million from only 475,000, according to Nielsen NetView. With all of those new Twitterers, fail whale sightings and site crashes seem more frequent.
"I love that it is growing to the point that we will no longer be able to micro-blog,” explains Klauss, “we will only be able to sit, and watch this adorable whale; but also this thing that represents the Herculean tasks that we sometimes go about from day to day. I have the image tattooed on my hush-hush places, and, like Andy Warhol, I intend to re-interpret the image in all my future artistic endeavors.”
Klauss is not the only Twitterer to feel this way. Bill (mr_bill on Twitter), a 36-year-old San Franciscan, has organized parties in honor of the whale. The most recent, held in California in February, was attended by more than 300 people, including Yiying Lu, the artist in Australia who created the image. Bill, whose fail whale parties have featured an aquamarine martini in honor of the icon's color, said the whale's popularity comes from the idea that failures are worth celebrating and learning from.
"We're all trying to do a lot of things that seem pretty impossible," Bill said. "It's nice to identify something positive with those failures."
Paul Paulson, long time friend of Klauss, and serial failure, attempted a similar “fail whale” party on the East coast, but tragically it was a complete bust.
“OMG, I felt like Jimmy Fallon on his late show!!!, “explains Paulson, “awkward, anxious, unable to talk to anyone one-on-one.” It seems that the group updates that intended to crash the system were not working. “We were all doing the usual things,” reveals Paulson, “you know, trying to take that 'What are you doing?' question literally, and put very inane things in our updates every, like minute, but we just couldn’t get the glorious whale to show itself! I was tweeting friends that couldn't attend (manic, CP, CW, TW33), and was really trying to push my own boundaries with witty “speed” updates, because I’m in training for next years Shorty Awards (The year's best producers of short* content 140 characters or less, on Twitter). I couldn’t BELIEVE that I didn’t win anything this year, but the whale has taught me to keep at it.”
It seems that Twitter is adjusting to the new “fail whale” obsession. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a statement to CNN, "We have made amazing progress from a technical perspective as far as accommodating this rapid growth goes and will continue to improve system and subsystem performance moving forward," So will Twitter’s advancements break up this new cult of complete failure junkies?
“Not at all,” opines Klauss, “We have failed. We must learn from failure. We must embrace our inner whale, and begin again.”
“Oh, we’ll see more and more of the “fail whale” in the future,” states Paulson, “ Celebrities are adding to the site's mainstream popularity, school’s in England are replacing studies about WWII and the Victorian Period with Twitter classes to expand communication! Imagine tweeting your teacher a 140-character book report on Moby Dick? I would love it!! People talk. That's what we do," continues Paul, "We're social creatures. We're kind of wired for this. We’ll overwhelm the system again. It’s only a matter of time before the “fail whale” will be a constant. If at first you don’t succeed…you know?"
The fail whale's account on Twitter has more than 2,265 followers. A Facebook group dedicated to the whale has more than 4,400 members. The whale has spawned art and merchandise, from coffee mugs to baby clothes.
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