Alternative monitoring opportunity? Grep a twitter stream for "EC2" and "down" and raise an alert if you get enough hits in 5 min?

What's funny is that this is what I find myself doing instinctually when I encounter an outage or high latencies on ANY service or site. Heroku (recent process startup woes), Google Apps (slowdowns, specifically Gmail), Amazon (when its hammered by traffic to big deals), etc etc.

I second the comment above suggesting a "crowdsourced" status app monitoring twitter. Although it's no consolation for service interruptions, it does at least keep you sane knowing the problem is elsewhere.