Many different services have been touted as the “Twitter replacement” recently, including FriendFeed, Pownce, Plurk and even the Google-owned Jaiku. All enter the scene with much fan-fare, typically gaining temporary popularity as Twitter users migrate over to check out the new service, ultimately returning to Twitter after giving up on having to build a new community/following. So far FriendFeed has been the closest in becoming a viable alternative to the ever-growing Twitter community in that it allows for users to comment and track posts to a variety of different social media services (including Twitter). It’s basically a way to combine all your social-media/blogging habits into one stationary form for easy cataloguing of conversations. Conversations? If you’re like most people, upon reading that word you are either scrathing your head or are skipping the rest of the post to hit the “Post Comment” button – Twitter doesn’t allow for traditional “conversations!” Well, I hate to admit this, but FriendFeed enables you to not only hold a conversation by pinning all related comments to a post, but also export them in a variety of ways including a custom RSS feed. Because of features like this, bloggers have been continually talking about the merits behind FriendFeed vs. Twitter. When Twitter goes down, people scamper over to FriendFeed…when they succumb to information overload, they scamper back to Twitter. Now there’s a new dog on the circuit – Identi.ca.

Identi.ca is as close to Twitter as you can get, microblogging ‘dents’ (as opposed to Twitter’s ‘tweets’) in a familiar 140 character limit. In fact it’s almost identical to Twitter….”almost” because Identi.ca was built with OpenMicroblogging in mind. This means that it is built on an open platform that can be shared with anyone else who wants to host their own federated version of the software. So unlike Twitter, which hopes to monetize the service in order to turn a profit, I can host a Laconi.ca server, sharing ‘dents’ with my identi.ca account as well as with anyone else running the same software. This means no more down-time as the stress that services like Twitter have been crippled by are now spread-out amongst any DIY service-operators/providers. Going from one service to another would also be seamless as Laconi.ca servers use OpenID to streamline user registration/login. Identi.ca has also just introduced a few new features that make using it more and more like Twitter – SMS notification, better Jabber/GTalk IM functionality, the ability to auto-follow your followers, and Twhirl integration.

The addition of Identi.ca to the popular twitter/friendfeed/seesmic client Thwirl is a big step in attracting more users to the service. Two other desktop twitter clients that have Identi.ca integration (and use Adobe AIR) are Spaz and Posty. I’ve also been told that there’s a Twitterfox version made to be used with Identi.ca called Identifox. I haven’t used it yet, but if you’re familiar with using Firefox to control Twitter then you’ll feel at home using this version.

Is Identi.ca the Twitter Fail-whale solution? Hardly. The user-base on Twitter is much too large to see any sort of mass exodus. Even FriendFeed is comprised primarily of users who have both FriendFeed and Twitter accounts. All these new services are simply entering the market too late in the game. In order for a new micro-blogging platform to take-over the Twitter community, Twitter will have to do something drastic to repel the community that uses the site/API on a daily basis. The closest thing I can dream up would be a mandatory subscription service in order to continue using Twitter. This is something that has been talked about amongst bloggers however I cannot see it being something viable for the monetization of Twitter. There are so many other ways for them to turn a profit without imposing on the main user-base, setting up a mandatory subscription service would only make the users who initially made Twitter popular leave for open-source replacements like Identi.ca. Striking a deal w/ mobile carriers in order to get a cut of the SMS usage, allowing for companies to use twitter as a more in-depth customer service tool or even standardized banner ads are all options that would be more profitable to the company. Until that happens though, these early-adopters will always return to Twitter – as it has now become ingrained in their daily personal & professional rituals.

Twitter and the ever-imposing “FailWhale” are safe for now it seems…..