Whatever happens to Twitter, it will be remembered for many good reasons – including branding. The name of the service has substantially expanded our appreciation of the English language: cue in Twaffik, twittonary, twootball, Outwit, twinfluence, and twanslate. People all over 
the globe have fallen in love with the blue bird and fail whale. The bird was an expectable symbol, given the service’s name – except that it didn’t quite work as a symbol for the network’s overload. So the fail whale took the centre stage… and now the lovely creature has got the fan website, gets slapped on mugs and T-shits, and even tattooed.
http://www.qik.com/swfs/qik_player.swf
Until this morning, though, I never came into a message about technical difficulties. The image looked strangely Surrealist. The Robocat certainly reminded me of a terrifying creature in Fuseli’s Nightmare (left) that was one of the paintings reverred by Surrealists. The whole image is a curious crossbreed between Yves Tanguy’s autistic landscape and Salvador Dali’s psychedelic terrain. The colours, of course, are very Pop Art. Either way, this gives us a good reason to add two more terms to Twitter-inspired vocabulary: Twirrealism and Twop Art.
The image of a dead Twitter bird is courtesy of Profy blog.
Paintings cited: Yves Tanguy, Sans Titre (1938) and Salvador Dali, Study for Honey Sweeter than Blood (1927).
