Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone.
Since Twitter was born out of a two week hackathon, the architecture of the site wasn’t built to handle its exploding growth and the service regularly went down.
Biz Stone, the voice of Twitter to its users, believed in being absolutely honest about the issues and the work being carried out by the Twitter team. While companies worked hard to convey a “perfect” image, his belief was that vulnerability is always rewarded with goodwill. So, the Twitter team created the now-famous “fail whale” – a humorous communication of the service’s outage.
He realized his approach was working just a few months in. When the Twitter team was working late at night before the Apple developer’s conference where an iPhone was rumored to be released, pizzas arrived at the office followed by a tweet from a few users asking if they’d received it. Their users didn’t think of Twitter as automated bots who caused them pain. Instead, they saw them as people working hard to make the service work. The fail whale went on to inspire many fan clubs and even a conference(!).
Here’s to vulnerability over attempts to look perfect.
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com
‘Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.’ | Biz Stone
A Learning a Day 