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failwhale posts

Filed under: Internet, Microblogging

Twitter down, Facebook funky, where's your ego-massaging messiah now?

Millions of people awoke today to find they couldn't tweet about their poops or post-party shenanigans. As the web cried a collective "oh noes," the alternatives started hiccuping as well. Yep, Facebook began having fits and spurts as it felt the collective sag of all those un-tweeting masses rush to the "next best thing."

So what? Well, I'm sure it'll all work itself out somehow. But centralized, walled systems (Facebook, I'm looking at your wall there) are bound to outage whereas distributed, open systems are less likely to suffer a similar fate. As usual, Dave Winer was right. (Note: Dave's not always right, but here I agree with him)

As TechCrunch points out, these things happen. Even the mothership at AOL suffered a massive AIM outage the day Michael Jackson died, and the NOC in Virginia is one serious monster of a server farm. But it's interesting to see the ebb and flow of the social masses as they move from one felled site to another, sometimes breaking branches as they go. Looks like Bebo and MySpace are unaffected. Ahem.

Update: Uh oh, did Kim Jong Il get upset about not being a trending topic? Ev says Twitter was and is fending off a denial-of-service attack.

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Utterz trades in one cow pun for another, becomes Utterli

Utterz, a mobile service for sharing photos, videos, and audio -- most people know it as a place to crosspost audio tidbits to Twitter -- recently got a total identity makeover. Well, not quite total ... the site is now called Utterli, which is a slightly more clever cow pun. But why the switch, after Utterz had already carved out an identity for itself in the market?

The company blog explains: "Utterz has outgrown its original identity. The cow puns, mascot, etc., are loved by some of our earliest customers and employees. ... However, the Utterz identity was limited in scope and appeal, inhibited some new customer adoption and interfered with some key business discussions." I would guess that their growing user base landed them some potential investors who were ok with cows, but not with the mental image of milking one.

On the new feature front, Utterli is now going to be organizing things around groups, as well as rolling out with partnerships with device manufacturers and other web services. They're not saying what these are, for now, but they do claim to be "quickly gaining on Twitter." Looks like we'll find out over the next few months whether the cow was really holding Utterz back. That infamous whale doesn't seem to be hurting Twitter's dominance of the microblogging world, though.

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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