Twitter A Fail Whale?

Long established Twitter users will remember the ‘fail whale’ image that appeared on users’ screens when Twitter was currently inaccessible. Lately however it seems that Twitter seemed to be living up to that very same fail whale image due to being taken offline by a ‘cascading bug’ on Thursday morning between the hours of 10am-12pm GMT.

Twitter’s renowned ‘flaky reliability’ issues ultimately affected and sparked complaints from over 175million of the micro-blogging service’s registered users and, despite Twitter’s disrepute of hacker claims, the ‘cascading bug’ could may well have been a metaphor for social network rival, Mark Zuckerberg, who reportedly requested all of his departmental staff to each create multiple Twitter accounts throughout the day to cause an inevitable overload, in a supposed ‘team building exercise’.

The cause for this rivalry may be clear as increasing amounts of Facebook users appear to be emigrating away from Facebook and FarmVille requests in favour of a more private community that proves to be a sanctuary when it comes to avoiding those annoyances featured on Facebook friends list who never fail to pop up at most inconveniencing times.

Twitter sources explained that the detrimental bug ‘isn’t confined to a particular software element but ‘cascades’ into other elements as well’, surely suggesting that the Twitter wars aren’t over yet. Is anyone else experiencing an overwhelming déjà-vu of school girl style A+ bitchery?! 

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The End Of A GAME-ing Era?

After an 11% fall in share prices on Friday (according to www.ukfinance.yahoo.com/q?s=GMG.L) and the GAME company issuing letters to customers detailing local impending store closures, it could be assumed that the company isn’t far from GAME-over.

The drastic fall in company shares comes after both company stores (GAME and GameStation) pulled from stocking one of the most highly anticipated 2012 releases, Mass Effect 3, and refunding pre-order consumers, directing them to buy elsewhere. This ensued a string of gaming developers including Nintendo, EA and Capcom to pull some of their upcoming releases from the retailer’s grasp, for example Mario Party 9, Street Fighter x Tekken, Kid Icarus for Nintendo’s unveiled 3DS and the third installment to the acclaimed Ninja Gaiden series. After asking staff from a branch of GAME, they concluded that the ultimate blow was their monetary ability to buy from major leading global game developer Microsoft, and their unwillingness to negotiate in terms of buying price.

It’s not too hard to envision the problem, as GAME’s business model is structured so that traded in ‘preowned’ games are the company’s richest profit-spinning component due to the notoriously poor trade-in cash and in-store exchange values dealt to potential exchangers. This means that less profit is made out of newly bought games and so the need to barter for the cheapest amounts to then sell on is paramount to the company ensuring minimum losses. If corporations such as Microsoft are not willing to negotiate, coupled with the possibility that gamers can find better trade in deals for their unwanted titles and so trade in elsewhere, means that ultimately GAME will lose out on pre-owned profits and fall down on higher buying prices and the future does not bode well with some rumours stating that there is an impending 2 weeks deadline for the company to turn themselves around.

A statement issued from GAME previously in February stated that 35 store closures from their current 610 UK outlets would take place by the 24^th March and that 60 more closures are due before the year is out. Many of the current 10,000 staff employed regionally are expecting redundancies, consequently furthering the UK’s problematic unemployment rates.

Another aspect of the downfall of the UK’s leading gaming retailer could well be partially due to the rise of internet shopping. Consumer reports during the Christmas period described how internet purchases had reached their all time high due to the population having less money to spend and therefore the consequent need to scour for the best possible deal which may have essentially proved tragic to GAME Company.

In conclusion, although there is major uncertainty over the meanwhile lasting duration and even the ultimate survival of the company, it will prove to be a major loss and a gaping hole in the gaming high street market despite the fact that there have been mixed opinions regarding the company as a whole and their tactics during their entire lifespan. Amidst the uncertainty, it definitely looks like GAME are preparing for the worst, and every visit into the store rings a reminder by staff to use up accumulated loyalty points, ‘just in case’. It’s unfortunate that it is partially due to the unloyalty of customers and suppliers alike that is leading to the rapid decline of GAME and Gamestation.

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Poke Wars 'Biggest Threat' To Forces

The US Army recently issued a warning foreboding soldiers regarding the poisonous chokehold of social networking site, Facebook, which has approximately 845 million worldwide victims to date. The warnings stated how, once registered, members would be continually harassed with ‘pokes’ and prods from people they vaguely remember meeting once in the queue for the local ‘Hole-in-the-wall’ ATM but suddenly claim that they are a ‘friend’, consequently beleaguering newsfeeds with Farmville and alternative unwanted virtual gaming requests. Users will continuously refresh the home page every couple of minutes in an entranced, seemingly unbreakable cycle, waiting in anticipation for the imminent inevitably grammatically incorrect statuses of members consistently using incorrect versions of ‘they’re, their and there’ where appropriate.

More than one million mobile phone users in the United States now use smartphones, according to a study published this week by Comscore, a market research firm. The British Army, however, has banned the use of all mobile phones due to the compulsion to log into social networking sites such as Facebook, not just due to the geo-tagging location facility that could potentially give away soldiers’ locations, but primarily due to the fact that a ‘poke war’ may ensue among the forces, and ‘that kind of thing may be used to an enemy’s advantage to weaken their spirit’ insighted Daniel Sherman of defence think tank Royal United Services Institute.

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Mark Zuckerberg calls Team Deathmatch

The social networking platform Facebook, which hosts approximately 850 million unproductive ‘soon-to-be-fired’ office workers from around the globe disconnected for two whole hours earlier this morning as Mark Zuckerberg wished to eliminate the annoyance of lag from his well-deserved game of Call Of Duty Team Deathmatch online multiplayer game with ‘the lads’ as he had especially plugged in his dust-topped first generation Xbox 360 Arcade (after all- ‘there’s no real monetary benefits in upgrading to a 250GB harddrive when a 256MB memory stick is perfectly adequate enough’). Zuckerberg decided to cover up his leisure pursuit with a half-hearted yet totally believable excuse filed under ‘technical issues’ that Twitter users found incredibly easy to swallow, given Facebook’s incompetency of lasting a week sans glitches.

The Twitter lads took this as an opportunity to poke fun at Facebook’s temporary downfall, trending #FacebookDown as perhaps a premature victory chant at the fact that they managed to beat Zuckerberg at his own game (of CoD). However, Zuckerberg’s mum didn’t seem too impressed with Twitter’s gloating and forebode that she would ‘get involved’ if the microblogging site didn’t ‘pipe down’.

There has been no word from Twitter since.

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