It's totally fitting that the first image I saw on my new iPhone web browser was Twitter's Fail Whale. 

It fit because: 1. Twitter is my most-used mobile app and 2. Twitter, for whatever reason, can't stay up these days.  

It also seems fitting that today the FTC announced that it had settled with Twitter over an old-old issue about security, which hardly seems, even remotely, the worst of Twitter's sins. The politicos haven't realized it yet, or maybe they have -- but we are becoming dangerously dependent on a single point of failure, and that point of failure is telling us not to trust us, these days, all the time with the cute little whale suspended by cute little birds. 

Nothing to say that I haven't already said many times. A more fail-safe version of Twitter, based on the architecture of the Internet, is totally feasible. It could be implemented by the client vendors, by simply backing up their users' tweet-stream in an XML-based format to a network of safe meeting places that's activated when Twitter goes down. Eventually, of course, once that system is reliable and performs well, it would replace the centralized system. It would be based on DNS, the naming system of the Internet itself. 

It wasn't that long ago that we thought the Fail Whales were a thing of the past. Now they're back. The lesson appears to be that as Twitter grows it will get more fragile, not less.  

Obama to Medvedev: Throw away red phones for Twitter.