The Fail Whale Fan Club

Yiying Lu has done it again. This time, it’s Fail Whale’s love interest, Eve Whale. She’s had a tuck here, a snip there, and she’s lookin…. HAAAAAWWWWWTTT!!!!

Hilary Talbot (@Hil121), a talented puppet maker and kinetic sculpture artist, created a beautiful sculpture of Fail Whale. An enthusiastic tip of the hat goes out to Hilary as well as all the other Aussies who have shown tremendous generosity, creativity, and humor in recent days!

[UPDATE 2008-06-29 09:00 PST]
Here is Hilary’s Blog Post about her sculpture

Jeff Sonstein (@jeffsonstein), a professor of Information Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, has announced the First Interplanetary Fail Whale Pale Ale Label Contest.  The Fail Whale Fan Club is contributing to the prize pool ($200 as of this post) as we think this is a fantastic idea! The poetic potential alone is worth it! See the details on how to submit your designs and please hashtag all your twitter chatter with “#fwpa”

[UPDATE 2008-07-10 9:30 AM PST]

Just a reminder that entries are due to Jeff Sonstein, the contest organizer, on July 31, 2008.  See the contest page for details

Yiying Lu, the talented and super cool illustrator of the Fail Whale image (”lifting up a dreamer”) has created a store front on Zazzle.com where you can get official Fail Whale merchandise.

Tom Limongello (@tlimongello), on behalf of @failwhale, @yiyinglu, and a whole bunch of New York City geek all-stars, sent a box full of failwhale t-shirts to the hard working folks over at TwitterHQ. Our reconnaissance (Summize.com) tells us that they have received them, and are not quite sure how to react. That seems fair. Just know that failwhale.com, and the efforts of the Fail Whale Fan Club are honest and sincere, and we wish the best for Twitter. We love the platform, we benefit from the community which it fosters, and we would be lost without it. We poke fun because we care! Fail Whale Cares!

Bellow is the letter that Tom wrote that should have arrived with the t-shirts:

Dear @_evan @airrun @al3x @alissa @benfu @biz @bs @crystal @ev @goldman @jack @jeremy @jkalucki @krissy @lane @meangrape @robey @stevej,

What am I doing? I wanted to send you all message expressing the support I’ve witnessed for Twitter since making my own FailWhale t-shirt. From watching your interview with Robert Scoble on Qik you mentioned you don’t need more money to keep twitter afloat, so we thought we’d send you these t-shirts to show our support as you figure out your approach to maintaining fewer outages. We would appreciate it if you would follow our efforts to make the FailWhale into a brand. We do not want to misrepresent the spirit of your brand and your efforts to make twitter more reliable, but we also want to participate. We as a group would hope that you could offer a nudge to your followers by acknowledging YiYing Lu @yiyinglu the designer of the FailWhale, originally titled “lifting up a dreamer” such that she could benefit from Twitter using her design to make cache failures into an endearing caché. Here is the link to the zazzle page with a preloaded image of the FailWhale where FailWhale fans can customize their own shirt with their handle and a slogan http://zazzle.com/failwhale…If one or more of you could tweet your thanks to her by including this link, or even better enabling a hyperlink on the Twitter / Over Capacity page to her personal website http://www.yiyinglu.com/sc/illustration I think that would show true solidarity.

FailWhale is quickly becoming a brand, and that is a very good thing. Twitter has proven that it does a great job of bridging the online world to the physical world, in fact it’s better than any service I’ve ever used. I wore my FailWhale t-shirt at Internet Week in NYC and that simple test returned an immediately favorable response. I wanted to help the FailWhale succeed as a symbol, even though what it represents has not been completely defined (also a good thing, because you can define this to benefit Twitter’s image as a service that supports all of its users). So I decided to make FailWhale t-shirts for FailWhale fans, most of whom were friends that I met on Twitter. I didn’t have the rights to the design, so I was going to keep the shirts to a small secret group of uberfans, but then I met Yiying Lu when @emmastory sent the iStockPhoto link to @failwhale and I’d like to make it bigger. And I am not alone.

Sean O’Steen, @seanosteen created his own designs, and the @failwhale profile with +350 with a mission to create a brand out of the FailWhale phenomenon. He also set up the FailWhale fan club http://groups.google.com/group/failwhalefanclub/ where new designs and expressions of love and support for the FailWhale will be managed.

Personally, I’ve met many people through Twitter starting at SXSW 2008 and here in NYC. I have been able to stay connected to people in different time zones, especially China where I lived on and off from 1998-2003, more effectively with Twitter than with any other social networking service, including skype, facebook, friendster, linkedin, chat, email or telephone. It is my pleasure to show our support, and we all hope you enjoy the t-shirts as much as we do.

Thank you Twitter!

@tlimongello

@yiyinglu, @seanosteen, @failwhale, @davidherrold, @fredericguarino,
@robertmurray, @alanataylor, @sanford, @whitneyhess, @gaeyia, @nicolejordan
@tonybgoode, @chrissieb, @truebluetitan, @mknell, @rebeccaforever