Open source Twitter competitor Identi.ca has had a lot positive buzz and powerful early adopters, but it sure does not feel to me like they’ll have any more luck than Pownce or Plurk has in overtaking Twitter as the microblogging platform of choice.
Some of the challenge is simple convenience – people who are on Twitter are going to be reluctant to spend the (small but annoying amounts of) time needed to sign up new contacts and reconfigure devices.
But mostly I think Twitter just enjoys the big advantage of being the service the introduced a lot of people to the art of posting notes to friends and followers and linking to blogs and articles as you see fit. I don’t like the term “microblogging” because I think few of the twitter comments rise to the level of a blog post, but clearly this approach is gaining ground and perhaps more widespread appeal than blogging because it requires so little time and effort.
Joe Duck 
Twitter has had a lot of public woes with Open Source technologies and a lot of alternatives have sprung up in the micro-blogging world, but no one has managed to dislodge twitter in its usage or appeal. ..
meaning that at least in theory it can attack scalability issues by federating together multiple autonomous servers..”
Perhaps Twitter will be dislodged by a Newcomer’s Installation Wizard developed by a Twitter-wannabe? Sort of a Plug and Play Twitter-Successor that makes the transition seamless and instantaneous.
Texting is “Big Bucks”.. yet its formally known as Short Message Service. I think the same applies to these ‘not sufficient to be called blog entries’. Short has real advantages.
FG I think Twitter is vulnerable, especially as some key early adopters in Silicon Valley seem to be fed up with the lack of reliability.
Short…does have real advantages – a great point.
>some key early adopters seem to be fed up with the lack of reliability
Clicks and Bricks comparisons. How did the marketplace view customer loyalty when car buyers flocked to foreign manufacturers, shoppers flocked to discount retailers, etc? There used to be an old Vaudeville routine that ended in the famous line “But what have you done for me lately”. Customers tend to be fickle. Lack of reliability is a serious defect. Sure there is an advantage to being first and to having some cutesy names, but resting on laurels is dangerous, particularly when a service is not only ‘down’ but rather noticeably and annoyingly ‘down’.
Consider perhaps the “Digg It” buttons that started to appear on websites. They were first. Now there seem to be about a dozen such buttons with different logos that serve the same “vote to promote” function. There was no “customer loyalty” there. Along came some companies that were merely different but saw a “Me-Too” opportunity. Twitter was first. Congratulations to them. They may “deserve” to survive and prosper for any number of real or imagined moral or entrepreneurial reasons. Being ‘deserving’ doesn’t really seem to cut it in the marketplace though.