Using twitter as an outage notification

Sat Jul 4 15:22:04 UTC 2009

On 04/07/09 17:07, Roland Perry wrote:
> That's the kind of "marketing-led" response I was hoping to hear.
>
> But the UK National Rail system now uses Tweets to tell customers about
> disruptions on the trains, and several major UK government departments
> and news organisations use it for announcements and "Breaking News".
>
> So has it become "respectable" yet?

When there are open-source equivalents available (e.g. Laconica, 
OpenMicroBlogger - both of which incidentally are compatible since they 
are based upon the OMB spec), I do wonder why a commercial or government 
entity would use a closed-source, non-domestic service.