What Twitterers Are Thankful For

Do you want to tell the world what you're thankful for? Will the Twitterverse suffice? How about you followers and the few people that go to TurkeyTwitter? What is TurkeyTwitter you ask? It is a site that was launched yesterday to give those celebrating Thanksgiving a place to see the collective thanks of Twitter users. Sure, you could simply use Twitter Search, and search "thanksgiving," but TurkeyTwitter provides updates and stats about the things people are thankful for. It gathers tweets based on the #turkeytwitter and #thanksgiving hashtag. In actuality, it's going to give you a lot more than just what people are thankful for. If anyone tweets anything remotely related to the holiday and includes a simple #thanksgiving hashtag, it will appear, but it is what it is. It's Thanksgiving, and someone took the time to make a Twitter-based Thanksgiving site, so we're talking about it. Case closed. If you follow @turkeystats on Twitter, you can see the top ten thankful items tweeted out. The creators note that the site is just a quick experiment. They even offer advanced apologies if there's something that doesn't go well. Don't worry guys, I think we'll all sleep tonight if we experience some TurkeyTwitter hiccups. If you have some time to kill, if you don't like football, or you just want to know what strangers are thankful for, check out TurkeyTweets.

Twitter Goes Down, No Cute Whale to Soften the Blow

While researching a story, I couldn't help but notice that Twitter was not working. It was timing out. The idea of Twitter not working is certainly not a new concept. In fact, it has kind of become accepted in some strange way and to some extent even celebrated.

You've probably seen a fail whale t-shirt somewhere, a reference, of course to the whale that Twitter ordinarly displays when it is experiencing hiccups. No whale in sight this time though. Just a cold error message:

Suddenly Twitter not working doesn't seem so warm and fuzzy. Twitter Search works though. In fact, the only aspect of Twitter that doesn't work appears to be the site itself. People are still able to tweet from other devices and applications. Searching for Twitter on Twitter shows that people couldn't wait to Tweet about Twitter search not working (this is starting to sound like a tongue-twister).

Twitter has acknowledged the problem on the Twitter Status blog, but doesn't share any clues as to what has caused the issue.

From this experience, I take away two points. The first one is that people freak out when they can't tweet. The second one is that Twitter's compatibility with outside apps and devices is a great thing for the company, especially considering that it "fails" so often.

I'm not sure how long exactly Twitter has been down, but it's been at least a half hour at the time of this writing.