With the rise of status or micro-blogging services, more and more web hosts are looking to add themselves to the mix.  So what do these quick micro-blogging services lend themselves to in the world of web hosting?  What about server status updates?  Lets say when a server goes down, you announce it on Twitter then thousands of people can follow you to find out when it is coming back up.

Why is it a Good Idea?

It mixes support and the new social web, plain and simple.  Web hosting is often seen as the old grandfather that listens to gangster hip-hop.  We are trying to be cool, but we always seem one step behind in the times.  It would also cut down on support requests, because customers and clients would eventually learn that any updates there are, will be posted to the Twitter account for the web host in question.

Why is it a Bad idea?

The negative impact in all of this is Twitter is probably down more than any web host out there.  This could cause mass panic if both a server was down, and Twitter was down at the same time.  Then, those who praised you for unique hosting support would be calling you up saying, “How could you rely on such a flaky service?”.  There are other Twitter-clones or Twitter-like services out there, but if you want to be where the people are – Twitter is where it is at.

My final thought on this is that it would be a generally good idea.  If you had problems with Twitter or the Twitter clones out there, you could always roll you own update service with WordPress and a unique set of themes and plugins.  For an example of that, see the Prologue plugin.  Web hosts need to think outside of the box, and this might be a good way to do just that.