Operator: "911, what is your emergency?"

Caller: "Yes, Twitter is down, and I don't know what to do."

I'm honestly kind of amazed that another startup hasn't emerged to eat Twitter's lunch.

I guess they must have an amazing marketing department, because they are down as much as they are up, and I bet just about nobody can name a competitor.

High switching costs + nothing compelling enough to move to a competitor for.

I know of at least one coming with another rumored to be in development. Without the cutesy factor of Plurk.

Plurk (www.plurk.com) funky UI, so a slightly higher learning curve, but pretty interesting.

I'm currently only using Twitter as a sideblog, and Plurk's version seems quite obtrusive. I don't understand sites' obsessions with branding their widgets.

You have to wonder why you'd want to base an emergency network on such an unstable platform, though.

There can also be an emergency backup generator, with pull cord, for Twitter. To be green, the generator's fuel can be animal poop (preferably from birds). Tweet!

An alert system's usefulness is proportional to its reach. For an online widely distributed alert system, Twitter's one of the few services that would fit that goal.

"distributed" in what sense? Technology-wise, Twitter is highly centralized - and a rather unreliable center at that.

A Twitter-like UI that would simply send email to all your emergency contacts might be a lot more reliable and much easier to scale.

I'd say, why not have the choice in addition to existing services?

Not that I think this is a bad idea...but c'mon...with Twitters lack of reliability?