[mvzink]

You just made me think of something. The common folk may as well continue using Twitter, and you're right about the bar to entry. We few, the vanguard of openness and reliability, can use approaches like Dave Winer's to provide an open, durable parallel "Twitter-like ecosystem" that integrates with Twitter—and once Twitter goes away (and Facebook and Google+ and even SMS) we will integrate with its successor—or hopefully, ideally, help create it's successor on top of the open web. It could be a durable base for future work, and a safety net for now.

Also: any time I consider using identi.ca again, it's with this view. Even if it doesn't gain popularity, I can at least provide my own guarantees that it will be around (so long as some few others use it) even when Facebook or Twitter go away.

[davewiner]

You got it baby!

That's exactly the idea. It's a bootstrap. You use the systems that are in place now to boot up the successor.

It's never either/or. You use everything that works, that has people on it that you need to reach, as long as they welcome you.

This has been the problem with Google-Plus. They don't have an API that lets you post to it. But Twitter does. To everyone who follows me on Twitter, they don't have any idea that I'm not really on their network. In every sense that matters I am.

But when Twitter goes down, I keep posting, and people who are hooked in my feed still get the new stuff.

[mvzink]

Good to know I got the point! :P Can I ask about your thoughts on StatusNet?

[glhaynes]

I can at least provide my own guarantees that it will be around (so long as some few others use it)

Isn't this exactly the problem? Keeping a service alive in perpetuity is missing the point because it's the communication that's important, not the service upon which the communication flows... Human communication is inherently temporally limited. If you ignore that, you're not gonna be heard now, which makes you even less likely to be heard in the future.

EDIT: I guess I'm just saying: nobody reads old messages on this sort of service. If you're not targeting "now", you're starting off with an immense disability.

[mvzink]

Aha, I didn't understand at all before your edit (no offense :P), and I think you have a good point, but it is actually on the "pro" side for approaches like Winer's: the hypothetical "Twitter-like ecosystem" is targeting now, just like Twitter (less the realtime-related problems, sadly), but is set up to continue targeting "now" once nobody uses Twitter, even during the transition period!

[carols10cents]

That's exactly why I work on http://rstat.us [1] -- we need to be here, ready, for the next decision that Twitter makes that pisses more people off, for the next time that Twitter is down, etc.

[1] - a microblogging site that uses ostatus; we integrate with identi.ca. code here: https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us