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Do you know about the Twitter "fail whale?" Of course you do - it's the iconic image that displays whenever the microblogging social network takes a nose dive. What many do not know, however, is that the so-called "Fail Whale" wasn't a creation from Twitter itself to decorate their startup's "uh-oh" page, but actually the work of an unknown artist, Yiying Lu, whose image was posted for use at a stock photo site. Of course, Lu isn't all that unknown anymore, as her fail whale was soon embraced by the community and turned into a social object.

And now that object can decorate your computer or even your walls, thanks to new Twitter art from Lu herself.

So, you have a great idea. You want to move your vision from whiteboard to Web host, but the trade offs (resources, time, money) make it difficult to decide what to spend your hard earned capital on. What can you do to get your idea out to the market with the least amount of investment, while also ensuring that you're ready for a flood of new users?

Luckily, it is now less expensive than ever to get get an Web application to market. A new generation of agile, cloud-based services help prepare your application and team for success. Now, your software and hardware can be ready for the time when your app is a hit, so you won't be famous for your own personal failwhale. We take a look at two companies that can help both small and large companies ramp up their Web offerings.

For a while, Twitter's reliability issues were a running joke in the blogosphere, with Twitter's iconic Fail Whale appearing on anything from tatoos to t-shirts. According to the latest update from Twitter, however, the service had an uptime of 99.88% in August. As Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone points out, Twitter is working diligently to improve the service's reliability. So far, those efforts seem to be working out quite well for the popular microblogging service. During August, Twitter was only down for about 1 hour, while in June, the service was unavailable for more than 11 hours.