via the New York Times’s Consumed – A Successful Failure – Fail Whale the story of the Twitter Fail Whale that we love and hate, and the an artist and designer Yiying Lu behind it.
See the Fail Whale in it’s native enviroment.
Via Flickr, you can see some of the variations on the Fail Whale theme.
ReadWriteWeb also previously posted on the had The Story of the Fail Whale
Update : on Wired : Twitter Paid $6 or Less for Crowdsourced ‘Birdie’ Graphic, the cautionary tale of Simon Oxley, the Japan-based Brit who licensed the bird graphic to Twitter for the price of a sandwich, through iStockphoto.
Unlike Twitter’s “fail whale” graphic, which the company purchased outright after it appeared on iStockphoto, Oxley’s bird design remains on the site where it can be licensed under the same terms Twitter received. Nothing is stopping people from making sites that ape, mock or build upon Twitter using its own official graphic.