Last week we made it possible for you to get Pingdom alerts via Twitter, giving you one more way to know if your website is down.

Initially we sent you alerts from a dedicated “alert account”, @pingdomalert, but some people also wanted to be able to have these alerts sent via their own Twitter accounts instead of TO them, so now we have added that functionality as well (i.e. alerts from Pingdom as your own status updates).

So you can use Pingdom with Twitter in three ways now:

1. Get non-public direct messages sent to your Twitter user from @pingdomalert
2. Get public status messages sent to your Twitter user from @pingdomalert
3. Have your own Twitter user send out alerts as status messages

(And just so there isn’t any confusion: @pingdomalert is only used for alerts. @pingdom is still our regular Twitter account where the Pingdom team tweets.)

Let’s have a look at the different ways people are using these alerts.

How people are using Pingdom Twitter alerts

It’s been gratifying see all the positive feedback, and just as interesting to see how people end up actually using these alerts. The tie-in with Twitter opens up some interesting opportunities for our users.

Getting free SMS alerts via Twitter

We knew this was going to be popular, and for those of you who live where Twitter offers free SMS (United States, Canada, etc), it can be a great addition. Unlimited SMS alerts to your mobile, even for free accounts. Pretty nifty.

Using them as public site status updates

Do you have users who depend on your site? Want to give them a heads up when you’re having trouble, and perhaps also keep your hosting provider a bit more on its toes? Send out your alerts as public status updates on Twitter.

If transparency is your thing, you might also want to consider activating a public uptime report page, something that all Pingdom accounts support for free.

And of course, using them as alerts, period

We already had support for sending you alerts via email and SMS, and Twitter can of course simply be seen as a useful complement to that.

Thank you

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your kind words and positive feedback. Much appreciated!

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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