Zoho has taken a step forward here with their latest service called Zoho Status. It displays the current status of all other Zoho's applications: Mail, Writer, Sheet and so forth. You can monitor the response time for every one of them from the following locations: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany and Australia. You can also see response time history, as well as details on recent availability and downtime.
This is a great idea. If something goes wrong with any one of Zoho's applications, you can quickly check out if the problem is on your side or theirs. Of course, I'm sure that the folks at Zoho will continue to inform their customers about problems, updates, downtime and similar issues via blog posts, but being able to see what's wrong for yourself, at any given time, is an advantage Zoho's customers will certainly enjoy. All other web startups take notice: this is the level of transparency we'd like to see from everyone, not just Zoho.