Using twitter as an outage notification (was: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle)

[Roland Perry <lists () internetpolicyagency com>]

In article <786BA8C0-B534-40FF-9126-1E33BD11CB3C () americafree tv>, 
Marshall Eubanks <tme () americafree tv> writes
> > That's a great idea, use some lame Web 2.0 trend to communicate with
> > actual real life customers. </sarcasm>
> I would assume they figured it was better than just remaining silent.

I'm about to recommend to an organisation that it [a twitter account] is 
better than posting news of an outage on their low-volume website, which 
will get swamped when too many people poll it for news.

What does the team think?

Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity 
during an emergency, isn't an option.

The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive 
an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in 
one SMS).
--
Roland Perry