I like this as an example of how you can do savvy marketing via using engineers to build stuff. They're in the monitoring business: all it takes is them sending one guy to snap a few of their own APIs together, put a quick design on it, and buy a $10 domain name. Then release it, promote it a bit, and it gets you incredible marketing returns relative to the amount of effort it took you to put out together.

Doing conversion tracking from the mini-site to the main site so that you can justify with real data that your 4 hours of work actually mattered is also a nice touch. (Check the links.)

The history definitely needs some work, since foursquare's API was down for a few hours yesterday and it doesn't reflect that.

Every time it checks, it should keep track if anything is down, and if something was ever down that day, it should reflect that.

Either they're not doing that, or they're not checking anywhere near enough (looks from twitter like foursquare API was down at least 4 hours).

If you click through you can get a timeline history that shows when a service was down. Maybe the history on the main page just reflects the status the service was in for the majority of the time each day. Either way, yes, that part needs some work.

Though I do remember that the first time I checked the site out, yesterday, I saw 4sq's api down. Not sure about the history though.

Being a UI person I wonder if this is as optimal as possible. I believe the default is that everything is working fine, no need to show me that as a horizontal rule. If there is something wrong it could have a rule with details and a link.

it should list the last downtimes instead of displaying a block of green icons. i am assuming that apis are up most of the time...

Do these guys have an API?