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Failwhale vs. time-to-market

By Larry O'Brien

August 1, 2008 — (Page 1 of 2)

Twitter, in case you haven’t succumbed, is a “microblogging” service. Here’s how it works: You toss brief SMS-sized messages into the stream and, far more interestingly, you subscribe to the notifications of friends, colleagues and “thought” leaders. It’s the refined sugar of continual partial distraction; the 140-character limit is too terse for complex thoughts, and the constantly refreshing stream resembles a never-ending “copy all” e-mail chain. It’s addictive.

Unfortunately, too many people have become addicted too fast. Twitter overloads seemingly every day. During overload, the stream of messages is replaced by Failwhale, an image by Yiying Lu of a sleeping whale being lifted from the ocean by a handful of red doves (I guess). Failwhale has become an icon, complete with fan club, Facebook page, coffee mugs and T-shirts, and kinetic sculptural tributes, all created, presumably, in lieu of tweeting, “Thinking about getting a haircut.”

Failwhale is a charming alternative to an HTTP 503 status code, but nonetheless his appearance can be jarring to a software developer. Somewhere, an error console is overflowing and thousands of messages are being lost. Twitter is a free service—at least for now—so Failwhale’s “cost” is just some vast multiple of zero.

Everyone expects Twitter to go commercial, probably with advertising and ad-free subscriptions, though. Meanwhile, other free microblogging services are out there, with Pownce and Jaiku perhaps the two most popular alternatives. Don’t the frequent surfacing of Failwhale bodes poorly for the future of Twitter?

Maybe not. In the dot-com boom, it was common to speak of “first-mover advantages.” In the early aughts, there was a backlash, pointing at the smoking embers of those who had been launched into the stratosphere before they showed they could walk. Now, though, time-to-market seems to be ascending again.

Tim Bray, distinguished engineer at Sun, put it this way on his blog: “If you and I have the same good idea for a community-based Web site on the same day, and mine is on the air in five months and yours in eight, then you’re dead. And it doesn’t matter if yours is better, because the community has gathered.” Bray even posits Twitter as the canonical example.

Related Search Term(s): QA, Testing & troubleshooting, Twitter

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Paper trails sometimes cover QA, but quality efforts fall down on manageability
Test case management applications are not widely used, so many organizations are still using manual systems, according to a survey from Seapine. This leaves many organizations with poor test documentation and a reliance on manually compiling test data, if they can gather any at all Read More...

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