Indeed. If your site is down because of the user's error, but they can still get to your competitor's site, then that's bad for you. It might not be your fault, but you still missed out on a potential sale.
All I can say is that I am glad I do not make money from the availability of websites :)
Post a status update and get the resulting status back as JSON: curl -u username:password -d status="your message here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
what it doesn't tell you is that it sends the pw in the clear (unless you count base64 as crypto!)
Since the API uses the twitter.com domain name, unless I'm missing something the only way that's possible is if the API was being man-in-the-middled.
Something doesn't add up.