also, "us in the media", what kind of whore talk is that even? twitter is correctly referrerd to in w3c docs as medium preventing intelligent discussion. so it was down? GOOD. people are inconvenienced? even better! it cannot possibly have hit anyone or anything that was worth fuck all.
I'm not sure why you suggest RSS is somehow synonymous with Twitter, but I will say that in addition to RSS buttons almost every major media company on the planet has a Twitter button on its article page (I work on one, which is why I say "us in media"). Because many sites don't do proper async JS when it comes to social buttons, an outage on socnets can be crippling
Twitter is infrastructure for us in media. It's well worth discussion.