In the midst of all that, Twitter raised a slug of new cash, landed its first acquisition, and repeatedly suffered embarrassing system outages. ( Twitter embraces the outages with humor by posting an image of the "Fail Whale," a smiling cetacean held aloft by eight cheerful birds. It's better to laugh than to cry.) " Twitter is at the forefront of the real-time web," says Fred Wilson, a Twitter investor and partner at Union Square Ventures. "Blogs were the beginning of that, a progression from the static web. Now with Twitter and other services there is this notion of smaller and ever more rapid bursts of information."