Why is the 'Fail Whale' smiling?

We have all witnessed the saving of AIG and GM and numerous other companies, all being talked about as necessary measures to keep the economy rebounding and to protect the country from financial shocks too big to be overcome. And actually this post isn’t even going to try to decide if that is correct logic or just standard government intervention. What I want to think about is: Are there other reasons that make a company too important to fail?

Going back to the GM reference, we would all still be able to buy cars and go about our daily lives if GM went under. Many people would have lost jobs and the reverberations would not have been small- I am not discounting that at all. Believe me I am from Michigan and know a lot of people feeling the impact right now. But my individual freedoms and access to information would not have been impacted. The damage is primarily economic. But what about the new wave of companies that have a different impact than a primarily economic one, would they receive the same consideration?

Would Twitter get the same reaction if it were to go under? I can imagine people rolling their eyes and saying that it is not nearly the same thing. But just the other day the US State Department asked the San Francisco based company to put off scheduled maintenance so there wouldn’t be a disruption in the tweets coming out of Iran.  (read about it here) With large media firms like CNN using Twitter as their eyes and ears in hot-spots like Iran the importance and profile of the 4 year old company continues to rise. It begins to make the case that the rapid rise of Twitter adoption has made it a necessary piece of society today.

However, Twitter walks a fine line of losing its credibility if it is viewed as a tool of a government or if it loses its grassroots charm. A company without a profit, a tool the government is apparently beginning to view as essential in some situations – is Twitter becoming a real force in the world that can’t be allowed to fail or will the act of saving it doom it to be rejected by its followers for being just another sellout or that wants to charge a user fee or bombard them with ads? Either way, Twitter is on the radar of just about everyone today – but the path ahead is not a clear one by a long shot.

What do you think – necessary tool or overhyped text service? Either way, an interesting turn of events for a company that has made the “Fail Whale” famous.