As The Twitter Turns or Days of My Twitter

Do you watch soap operas? If not, let me explain the basic storyline. Jack loves Mary. Jack and Mary get married. A week later, Mary finds out that Jack was cheating with Mary’s sister who already has 2 babies from Jack’s father. At that point, Mary shoots Jack but finds out that Jenna made up the whole story just so Jenna could get back at Sarah. That’s two months of shows rolled up into 30 seconds.

Let’s switch the channel to As The Twitter Turns. One day the storyline is, "Twitter is a failwhale and I am moving to FriendFeed". The next day we hear from the same people, "Twitter is so great for things like today’s Earthquake". Tomorrow Twitter won’t load for one of the "family of fail" members and immediately "failwhale" will appear on the Google Trends list again. And on and on and on.

It’s interesting how quickly the Twitter team is to highlight how awesome Twitter is instead of fixing their internal issues. You can slap chocolate ice cream on a rusty nail but it’s still going to taste like crap. Change the rusty nail to a slice of pound cake and now the chocolate ice cream will taste much, much better. Posts like todays help to fuel the "family of fail" when the service isn’t working properly tomorrow.

Nowhere do we see the sheep line up in formation better than around Twitter. One head sheep tells the other sheep to go fail, they all go fail. Then the same head sheep tells the other sheep to go great, they all go great.

Picking on Twitter is old and played out. It was cute for a while but it’s time to move on folks. If you aren’t happy on Twitter, check out, delete your profile and move to a service that meets your needs. When Twitter is down, we all know it – there’s no reason for everyone to announce it on the other social services.

Today NYC blogger Steve Rubel lose it (if that’s possible) and ask for people to start talking about success instead of fail(ure). I am with him. Enough is enough – I know it’s "cool" and "uber geek" to run around wearing a tshirt with the failwhale and talking about fail this and fail that, but c’mon already. Based on Rubel’s suggestion, Flickr user Lemansey has created the success whale displayed below.

Let’s all stop the soap opera and get back to talking about technology. There are plenty of other topics to discuss.

Update: JungleG has a look at why Twitter will never fail and people should just stop talking about it.