Check out these “Fail Whale” t-shirts, the first of what is expected to be a long line of Twitter-related schwag.
The image of birds straining under the weight of a whale they are trying to support appears on the Twitter main page when the site is experiencing server overload. Twitter users lovingly dubbed it the “Fail Whale” and the name stuck. The “Fail Whale” has come to represent society’s growing dependence on social networking and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.
The downside to these promotional t-shirts is that they don’t have the Twitter URL or logo displayed anywhere on the t-shirt. It seems these shirts are intended more to create a sense of “community” amongst twitter users than to attract new users, although I would guess the folks as Twitter are hoping the t-shirts will create more buzz surrounding their already enormous user-base.
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