The only reason those services use Twitter is because that's where all the people are. I'm not saying this isn't a beneficial use case, but Twitter isn't necess

The only reason those services use Twitter is because that's where all the people are. I'm not saying this isn't a beneficial use case, but Twitter isn't necessary for these kinds of services. I would even go so far as to say that corporate entities using Twitter to provide their users a service (outage reports) they should pay for the privilege or be forced to set up their own notification networks.