Successful failure

Maybe it's weird, but I actually prefer the "Fail Whale" to Twitter "hanging" before it finally loads a page that lost its formatting somewhere in The Tubes. In Programmer School, they teach you the virtue of anticipating failure and handling it as gracefully as possible. The Whale's a textbook example of that. (Plus, I just think it's cute as all get-out.)

I was in a glass-half-empty mood this morning when it occurred to me to wonder whether Twitter's flakiness is kind of their "secret sauce." If you're suitably cynical, it makes sense in a couple of respects:

1. "Not quite perfect" means that a technology's still bleeding edge. That makes you, dear Tweeter, one of the cool kids. (Never mind I'm here right now, effectively canceling out coolness by the boatload.) Heck, when half the kids in Africa are tweeting from solar powered OLPCs in the coming years, "not quite perfect" will still whisper in your ear that you're edgy, so you're getting in at the ground floor, at the front of the line. Right?
2. Service outages enforce the perception of scarcity, something that always plays into the hands of marketers. Always. Worse, you have to keep that sparkling thought in your head just a few more seconds. Oh noes, maybe a few more minutes. Or--Eeek! How old school!--you may need to write it down and deprive the world of its luminosity for whole hours on end. (The humanity!)
   

Of course, my cynical little theory is contravened by the fact that everyone's waiting for the other shoe--meaning the assimilation into Google--to drop. Google can't get away with spotty performance and perceived scarcity. (It has a Microsoft to show up, after all.) Why? Have you've ever seen, say, Pink Floyd in concert? You just cannot-not-NOT imagine them as a garage band, now can you? Nope. Not ever. That's the difference between Google and Twitter, at least in terms of image.

But after the inevitable acquisition, you can bet I'll be watching the change in image as the marketing and branding folks step in. Personally, I think it will be highly instructional. Not to mention just plain interesting.