Thanks for the suggestion! We use Twitter for offsite status update because people expect it of us, it's simple and works cross-platform (clients for everything), and their servers aren't likely to have problems even if the issue that we're having is affecting a lot of the internet. I'll take a look at those sites, although I'll be honest -- the "easy" and "stable servers" are really the important consideration over using something that's specifically open, since when we're having problems or an outage, we want the offsite status update to be as reliable and as simple as possible to update. (Generally, yes, we go with an open solution over a proprietary one, but this isn't a core focus of the site, just an easy way to keep people posted about any problems that come up.)