I've implemented two new ways of keeping up with the yocto
autobuilder's build status (other than the obvious way of looking at
autobuilder.yoctoproject.org:8010 of course)

First is through the yocto-builds@... email list. If you
haven't joined it yet, please do. It's in testing phase right now and
only sends out the last 20 lines of the autobuilder log on a failure
and the URL to the steps that failed.
The second is through the #yoctobuildstatus irc channel. yocto-ab-bot
is the yocto-autobuilder IRC bot which announces build events to the
channel or via PM. I'm keeping it off of #yocto to keep it from
spamming the channel but it should be relatively low traffic. Again,
this is all still in testing phase, so things may change.