Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [92]
Anxious to have lots and lots of followers? First, it doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Second, be patient and build a network of actual connections, not collections of usernames and large follower numbers. It takes time for people to notice you; you’ll need to have posted a few updates or tweets first. But if you share posts that others find valuable (in other words, you write tweets that people find interesting or informative), your follower count will grow organically. Getting more followers may take a while, especially if you have esoteric interests, but having a following of attentive and interested listeners trumps having a large number of followers any day.
Adopting the Fail Whale
Twitter is still a young service, and although it has grown exponentially, it has had some growing pains. Most frequently, its growing pains revolve around service outages, which typically occur when the servers become overloaded.
Twitter has a variety of kitschy graphics that appear when the service has problems. Best known is the Fail Whale, who comes out to play, towed by seven Twitter-logo-like birds (four of them are flying backwards), each time the service goes over capacity. The Fail Whale started life as a birthday card design called “Lifting the Dreamer,” designed by Yiying Lu. There are other “failure” graphics — kittycats with screwdrivers (no longer used), the unscheduled maintenance caterpillar, the “just chill” ice cream cone, and owl and a Fail robot, but none has engendered the love and following of our dear Fail Whale.
Instead of becoming upset that their darling service was down, Twitterers reacted differently to the Fail Whale. The shared experience of losing access to the service fostered a sense of community so quickly among its users that they ended up adopting the Fail Whale as their mascot for banding together in tough times. They made t-shirts. They created a contest for designing a label for the Fail Whale Pale Ale, a mythical brew (see http://tweetcrunch.com/2008/08/17/the-twitter-fail-whale-pale-ale-contest). You can find Fail Whale plushies, mugs, t-shirts, and more. Few companies are able to transform a potential disaster into a point of culture for its users, but Twitter pulled it off.
What makes that plot twist interesting is how emblematic it is of how users feel the service as a whole. That sense of family and community transcends obstacles and gets things done. The adoption of the Fail Whale by the twitterverse was a sign that Ev, Biz, and Jack, the Twitter founders, had indeed hit a home run.
The first time you make a real, organic connection with a stranger on Twitter, it might feel a little weird, but it’s also a bit thrilling. Whether you do something as simple as get (or give) a much-needed answer to a question, connect for business, or bond over something fun (such as music or sports), you’ve just made your first Twitter-friend.
Twitter is based around people and their networks. These interpersonal networks are the most important aspect of this simple and (we admit) quirky service. Real connections power Twitter — those connections are the heartbeat of your Twitter community.
In its early stages, Twitter went through some serious technological growing pains while it got more popular, leading to significant site downtime and unacceptable levels of quality of service. But the power of the connections and the format of the service kept it going. Without that network of connectivity, no one who uses Twitter would have had the patience to not only stick around while the people behind the service worked out the kinks, but also to embrace the problems and create solutions.
One of the most common issues with Twitter during its early days was downtime — the server frequently became overloaded with too many users writing too many updates. Although users couldn’t access their Twitter accounts, the development team was nice enough to let you know