I dug a little deeper, and ostatus is a currently working group committee within the w3c.
If I was the cio at oh, say an org in the public realm (generic government agency for example), I'd rather have control over the publishing and namespace of its tweet-like messages rather than putting every egg into the single-basket solution. Who knows if twitter will be around 20 years from now?
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.