fail

With the fail whale cropping up even more than usual, I think I have found a good backup for Twitter.

The folks at humorous paper products company Knock Knock have come up with an entirely analog variant of the microblogging service.

The company sells notepads billed as "Paper Tweets," where people can use pen and paper to jot down their witticisms of 140 characters or fewer. There are check boxes to indicate whether you are retweeting, replying, direct messaging, or just updating your status. And even a place to write in one of those silly hash tags. The … Read more

Graphics in a political attack ad for California gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman that imitated popular humor blog FailBlog aren't going over too well with Cheezburger Network, the amalgam of blogs that owns FailBlog.

"We are talking to our attorneys on this," Cheezburger Network founder and CEO Ben Huh told CNET via e-mail. "We haven't decided on a course of action, if any. The law is a complex beast."

Huh's comment followed a post he wrote Friday on FailBlog, in which he addressed the fact that a recent video campaign … Read more

It's been way too long, but CNET's own Molly Wood is back for a special cross-coastal episode of The 404! We chat with Molly about what she's been up to lately, including a new Molly Rants blog on CNET and her recent conversation with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. She also hints at future CNET Conversation guests, so stay up on CNET TV for the latest news.

Molly is a perfect fit for The 404--don't believe us? Check out the latest episode of The Buzz Report for a ridiculous "study" from the U.K. Guardian that links syphilis outbreaks to Facebook! "Professor" Peter Kelly, the director of public health for the town of Teesside, links a sudden increase of syphilis in students to their propensity toward the popular social networking Web site , and that is the only evidence he offers. We're still struggling to draw the connection ourselves, but suddenly MySpace doesn't seem that bad after all.

The latest Burger King ad campaign is blowing our minds--apparently they're sponsoring Digg.com's 404 page with an ad for the $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger that will appear when users type in a query with no results. The exact message, according to WalletPop reads, "No results for 'Your Search Error' were found. Looks like your search had a typo. Blame it on your tiny hands. The beefy $1 Burger King Double Cheeseburger gives tiny hands some trouble, too." Sponsoring an error page sounds counterintuitive for Digg since we assume that most of its users are tech-savvy. Maybe they'd have more success sponsoring Twitter's Fail Whale page.

Stick around for plenty more stories about the world's hottest chili pepper, cellphone etiquette, amateur snapshots from space, and, of course, we wouldn't let Molly leave without giving us a little taste of her famous nerd voice. Have a great weekend everyone!

AUSTIN, Texas--It's hard to believe, given the power Twitter wields at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here, but not half an hour into his keynote address, people are walking out on Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Perhaps it's because Williams announced the news everyone wanted to hear--the @Anywhere platform--right at the outset of the talk. But more likely it's because, as much as everyone here loves Twitter, Williams simply is not the most engaging speaker.

And the slow leaking out of people from the giant exhibit hall at the Austin Convention Center where Williams … Read more

Seriously, Twitter? We thought the company had learned by now that Steve Jobs has the mystical power to instantly summon the fail whale--or in other words, that nerd chatter surrounding any kind of Apple product announcement is enough to swamp the microblogging service's infrastructure.

An hour before Apple's San Francisco event to the much-hyped tablet device now known as the iPad, Twitter had already slowed to a crawl, spitting out tweets between eight and fifteen minutes late--and sometimes out of order--on both the Twitter.com home page and third-party clients. It doesn't seem like there were … Read more

Vanity Fair magazine, with its crisp and alluring takes on everything from international affairs to celebrity culture, is the sort of publication known for being current, relevant, and in the know.

Yet in its February issue--yes, the one with Tiger Woods on the cover--it managed to publish one of the silliest, most superficial, and most wildly out of touch articles about Twitter that I've ever read. Called "America's Tweethearts," it discusses the phenomenon of individuals (primarily attractive women) who have amassed notable amounts of Twitter fame, or "twilebrity." (Twilebrity? Barf.)

Accompanying the article, … Read more

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

"We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem," a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, "We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage."

Many members had reported sightings of the "fail whale," … Read more

The tech world is all too familiar with Twitter's "fail whale" and have become accustomed to Gmail failures (which are inevitably chronicled on Twitter.) And while sometimes it's infrastructure (such as routers and switches) rather than software that fails, it often seems as if we too readily accept that software will inevitably breakdown.

Mark Donsky, director of product management at Coverity, commented recently about a recent static analysis of open-source projects performed on the Scan site that showed a 71.9 percent correlation between the number of lines of code and number of defects found.

This is of course, not an open-source problem but a general issue that occurs as more code is integrated into products. I've been told that Windows is developed with two quality assurance people to every engineer as the product has grown over the years.

Coverity is focused on software integrity and advocates static analysis early in the development cycle. While testing of all kinds, including static analysis are obviously good ideas, the tools and methods vary dramatically by engineering organization. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University and the Object Management Group (OMG) recently paired up to form a consortium to establish standards for software quality. … Read more

Aside from some technical difficulties today and a giant bug bite, we've got a great show featuring all three of your favorite Web celebrities. Before we get to the stories, we want to remind everyone of The 404 logo contest and of our appearance on our buddy Clayton Morris' FoxNews.com's Strategy Room to talk about all the good tech, video game-related goodness at 2 p.m. EST.

On today's show, find out ways that kids now are using abbreviations in text messages to hide things from their parents. Apparently, "RU/18" is something that kids these days are getting on their cell phones. Also, Pfizer is giving away free three-month supplies of Viagra and Lipitor because of the recession, but only if you were on the drugs before you got laid off. We hope Justin isn't itching to get fired for this deal.

In regard to a story about China shutting down a sex-themed park, Wilson gives us way too much information about "the talk" with his mom when he was 15. Justin and Jeff learned everything from "Sesame Street." Speaking of more things naughty, there is a new version of "Star Trek" called "Star Trix", and we can't really say much more about it other than it's totally NSFW.

Finally, showers make you more productive at work. Just be sure to watch out for peephole-size openings at work. Be sure to write in at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. We'd love to see more of your submissions for our logo contest. See you on Tuesday after the Memorial Day break!