Twitter is celebrating the launch of Twitter Places by presenting all users with the Fail Whale for at least the past hour.

According to the Twitter status blog, this time the outage is due to “scheduled maintenance,” and more information will be posted as it becomes available:

We are experiencing site-wide availability issues due to scheduled  maintenance. We’re currently working to address the issues. We’ll update with more information as it is available.

If the maintenance is scheduled, why doesn’t Twitter announce it beforehand? And why schedule it between 9-10pm on the West Coast? And why is information pending if this is all routine? Twitter’s been out of commission at least twice this week- most recently Sunday, and before that, on Wednesday during the day. It looks like you’re going to have to go elsewhere to discuss Justin Bieber for the time being, Twitter users.

Twitter is down again is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you tweet, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of messages welcoming back (or complaining about) the Fail Whale.

Twitter’s iconic “over capacity” message has been making a lot of cameos over the past two days, for reasons Twitter’s status blog says are down to a “system-side issue.” The first post addressing the issue came yesterday just before noon PST:

We had a system-side issue this morning starting around 0800 Pacific that resulted in  twitter.com experiencing two 30 minute back-to-back incidents over roughly one hour.  The problem has largely been addressed, but we aren’t quite to 100 percent yet.

Twitter most recently addressed the issue less than an hour ago, saying that features like search and friend counts were being disabled until functionality improves:

We are experiencing site availability issues — additional latency and errors — this morning. We’re working to address these issues.

Update: 9:07 PDT / 16:07 UTC: Users may notice that their timelines are updating slowly. All tweets will eventually be delivered.

Update: 9:32 AM PDT / 16:32 UTC: To help stabilize the site we’re turning off a set of features including but not limited to: Twitter Search, hovercards, web sidebar data (trends, friends counts, etc), and profile image uploads.

Twitter has not posted any updates indicating when users can expect issues to resolve, but says they’re “working to recover from this problem.”

Oh, hey, Fail Whale, what up? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Geography fail? Monarchy awareness fail? European relations fail? Maybe they should’ve stuck with “son of Diana.”

[Source: Fail Blog]

Royal Title Fail is a post from: The Inquisitr

Just about everyone these days has some idea of what the term FAIL whale means when it comes up in conversation. It is one of those rare terms that while meant for something specific, in the case Twitter crashing, but has gone on to mean a whole new nomenclature when it comes to things that have failed in one fashion or another.

In Russia however the FAIL whale is being supplanted by a new movement called Whale Tailing and it is spreading like wildfire among the Russian social networks. The basic idea as you can see from the picture is when a woman lying down thrusts her ass up in the air and then takes a picture. I’m not sure exactly what is driving this along considering it is women doing this, which consider the term ‘plumber crack’ maybe it’s a good thing only women are behind this newest meme.

hat tip to Geekologie

The FAIL Whale has nothing on the white whale is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing other than celebrities that has spurred the momentous growth of Twitter it is the incredible developer community that has risen up around the service. I have said in the past that this has been one of the biggest strengths of Twitter because it allowed people to create clients and services around Twitter leaving it to concentrate on making the service better.

However as I noted when I was developing a Twitter client back in the first year of the service as much as Twitter needs these developers they do things that end up harming this marvelous community. It was one of the reasons I quit developing Twitbox because I had gut feeling that there would come a point when Twitter would make decisions that could harm any business built around their service. Well that point has come and we are only starting to see the repercussions.

In a post on the official Twitter blog the company announced that they were making changes in the way developer’s could access the Twitter API

For some time, we’ve limited the number of accounts that a single person can follow in a day to 1000. A few days ago, we found that this limit was not being consistently applied and we started enforcing it for all users.

While there are technical reasons behind having some limit on following activites, this per-day limit exists to discourage spamminess. Also, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes the mass following activity disingenuous.

This action prompted an immediate reaction by Jesse Stay, the person behind the SocialToo service, where he said on Twitter (via Friendfeed)

“WTF @ev and @biz! You could have responded to my e-mail I sent to you first. You just killed what was feeding my family: http://bit.ly/Nec72”

First let me echo the sediments of Allen Stern from CenterNetworks when he says

I know it’s easy to build on top of Twitter or a quickie iPhone app, but do these “on top” services have staying power and real business potential? Before you say yes, now think about if Twitter or iPhone makes a change that alters the app’s ability to continue.

I realize that this sucks for developers like Jesse but not only is this unexpected but it is also going to be a trend we see happening I believe with more and more of these services that have so called open APIs. I would seriously suggest to all developers that you think long and hard about developing software; or web apps, that rely on the good graces of the hosting service.

To Twitter I would say this WTF are you thinking. Seriously. This is a severe mistake on your part to be chopping off developers at the knees like this. Developers who have given their all to make your service what it is. If you think that Twitter would be anything that it is today with only your web interface to the service you are severely screwed in the head.

The fact is your web interface sucks monkey balls but it is the developers out there who have managed to make something incredible useful out of something that is nothing but a bare minimum of a web application. Instead of this ridiculous short sightedness you should be trying everything in your power to improve your systems so that things like this aren’t necessary. After all what the hell are you going to do when the seeds planted by people like Oprah, Kutcher and other famous people start sprouting users like no tomorrow.

When that happens if you think that over the long haul people are going to be satisfied with just your anemic web interface you are sorely mistaken. You need all those developers that you have been cutting off at the knees but the only problem is that you’ve now succeeded in only scaring them off at the very least.

Dumb … very dumb.

Twitter killing developers not so softly is a post from: The Inquisitr

Tech tattoo champion Critter never knows when to stop, and what better for a guy who has the logos for Twhirl, Seesmic, Adobe AIR and Cold Fusion then to add to the mix with a Twitter Fail Whale Tattoo.

Via Geeked.info, the video of the tattoo being inked below:

EPIC FAIL Whale Tattoo is a post from: The Inquisitr

Good news today for Last.fm lovers, the official Last.fm iPhone application has been released…for some, as it doesn’t appear to be available outside of the United States and some part of Europe, because it certainly isn’t available from the iTunes Australia store.

The Last.fm team writes on their blog

First of all we are initially rolling this out in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Spain. We’re looking at other locales but have to deal with licensing and a host of other issues. We assure you that we’re working on it.

Licensing issues? Hold on a second, don’t I have the Last.fm Mac application on my laptop and desktop, happily delivering music on demand? Exactly what difference does an iPhone application have in terms of licensing that the Last.fm website doesn’t have? And what exactly is “a host of other issues?” Is Apple making it hard to distribute apps across multiple iTunes stores perhaps, as Google isn’t offering its iPhone search application either (and there can be no licensing issues there).

Is Apple to blame?

For now, Last.fm iPhone App is riding the fail whale. A service that has benefited greatly from not being georetarded like Pandora is now choosing to not distribute its iPhone app that is in no ways different to the desktop in regards to local licensing issues.

If anyone can suggest an alternative let me know.

Last.fm iPhone App rides the georetarded fail whale is a post from: The Inquisitr

We’ve seen no shortage of new players enter the microblogging space recently as Twitter has ridden the fail whale. I don’t have a lot of details about how the Pringo microblogging service will work, for example will the service be within each social networking site or across Pringo powered sites, but consider the broader implications: if you thought you’ve seen a rush of Twitter clones already, wait till they become a standard add-on to every non-major social networking site. Pringo is a more specialist white label provider, compared to say a service like Ning, that offers social networking sites for everyone, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess that other players in this space are likely to folow suit.

Pringo client sites include StreetCred, MyCountrySpace, and eHarmony.

Pringo adds Microblogging to White Label Social Networking Mix is a post from: The Inquisitr

The best quote of the day: Leo Laporte
““It’s funny to see all the Twitterati flock to – we’re all so desperate for a Twitter that works. Why not just clone it?”

Why not indeed. We love the community on Twitter, but we hate the train wreck it has become.

Where this need for working platforms becomes a challenge, from Veronica Belmont
“OK, I joined the new one. Man, I’m getting kind of tired of joining things.”

Shel Israel asks
“Is there anyone here who has actually left Twitter?”

Some have, some find it hard to part company, a point I fully understand.

Need friends to follow on Indenti.ca? Directeur and Dave Winer come to the rescue, both threads providing lots of great people to follow.

Talking of Dave, the most that started the morning for me: Oh happy days.

It’s not been all clear sailing in Indenti.ca land. Besides becoming very slow as more and more people signed up, they also broke the cardinal sin of new services: never upset Robert Scoble:

“Someone already registered scobleizer on identi.ca — I sent an email asking for my account back. Sigh.”

“Funny, my email to identi.ca bounced back. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.”

A full, running update on the Identi.ca discussion can be viewed on FriendFeed here. The Inquisitr’s coverage here, and a more informal post I wrote on my personal blog here.

Other coverage: VentureBeat, Sarah in Tampa, Ross Mayfield, Tom’s Tech, Mashable and The Standard.

“We’re all so desperate for a Twitter that works.” The Identi.ca wrapup post is a post from: The Inquisitr

If OpenMicroBlogging means nothing to you, let me explain. From very early on folks like Dave Winer have been calling for decentralized microblogging, where you can host your own microblogging platform but each site could communicate with each other. The main advantage of this system: when one service goes down the whole system doesn’t fail, like it does with Twitter. If you weren’t getting good service with one provider, you could then easily switch to another provider, while keeping the same friends and identity. Competition in this way encourages excellence, as opposed to Twitter which really only encourages lots of moaning.

The release of the code behind Identi.ca (called Laconica) is a bonus again, as in theory anybody can grab this code today, install it, and run their own microblogging service that is cross compatible with Identi.ca.

Bwana points out in a post that Indenti.ca is fairly feature poor so far, and the service lacks basics such as an API. There is a long list of “soon” features here, the bigger question though is how quickly some of the key features can be rolled out to keep people using the service?

Dave Winer on the other hand simply headlines it as “Oh happy day.” This isn’t a perfect service, but with open source code and cross host microblogging, Identi.ca could be the first real step to decentralized microblogging, and given Twitter’s ongoing service crisis, could be the beginning of the end for Twitter.

If you want to follow me (and I’ll follow you back) I’m on Indenti.ca here.

Could Identi.ca be a Fail Whale Killer? is a post from: The Inquisitr