Tale of the Fail Whale and Open Distribution
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Posted by Jenn Lowther
* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity
Twitter is a hugely popular micro blogging platform that I have written about many times. For those of you who are unfamiliar with twitter, it’s basically a micro blogging platform. You get 140 characters to say whatever you want. You add friends - creating your own social network and let them know what you are doing through your status updates. If you want to read more about twitter, you can find more info here.
There is one major problem that twitter encounters regularly and that is its problem with up time. Twitter has grown so fast that the technical team behind twitter just cannot make the site scale fast enough to keep up with its current adoption rate. When the site goes down, twitter puts up its iconic picture of what has been coined the Fail Whale. Anyone who frequents twitter regularly, knows what I am talking about.
I never really gave the origin of the Fail Whale picture much though. I figured that it was an image that the twitter team threw together in house. That is until I read a post on Read Write Web.They have covered this topic in far more detail than I have and it is definitely worth going over and reading their post.
It turns out that the origin of the Fail Whale is artist Yiying Lu. She uploaded her picture to iStockPhoto where it was found and used by the twitter team. Unfortunately for Yiying, twitter never gave her credit for the photo. She remained in obscurity until Tom Limongello wanted to make Fail Whale t shirts and needed to get the rights to use the photo. This is when the story broke about the artist behind the iconic picture. They are now selling the t shirts in the Zazzle store and Yiying is now making money off of her art.
This is a great story that shows the value of open content and social media. Many of us are now using available social media sites, such as flickr, to share our work and allow distribution through creative commons licensing. This goes against traditional models where DRM has tried to be strictly enforced - the online music industry is a prime example of this.
I firmly support open content and fully believe that there are strong revenue models that can be utilized through open distribution. A perfect example is that of a photographer. By uploading their work to sites like flickr and allowing their use through creative commons licencing, they are receiving far greater distribution than they possible could otherwise. Through the people taht see their work, one maybe a future client who hires them to cover an event - creating a revenue stream that they would not have had they not uploaded their content. We’ve even had experience with this inhouse. One of the employees here uploaded a picture on flickr and was later approached by a company in Japan who wanted to pay him for the rights to use his picture on a tshirt.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
[...] This is going to be the first in a series of posts looking at various industries and how they are utilizing twitter. If you are unfamiliar with twitter, I recapped what it is in this previous post. [...]