good point Mark...the next twitter-esque micro blogging service to take off will have to be seriously awesome to supplant the ground twitter has covered...but my money is on identi.ca forcing twitter to truly open up - joshuabacker

Nothing will supplant Twitter. Nothing will come along that will make the entire Twitter user-base up and move. Someone could create the absolute perfect micro-blogging, opensource, media-embedding platform that never went down, but it won't supplant Twitter. Know why? Everyone is too lazy to rebuild their network. They can't bear to leave their homies on the sinking ship. Plus, it's too deeply entrenched. It's like Windows. - Rah-PM 2012

To some extent ... have to support Rahsheen. They all keep going back ... including everyone that said they wouldn't ... but I never say never ... and it's great to mix things up once in a while - Charlie Anzman

"like" for Rahsheen's insight... - JA Castillo

Only a sith deals in absolutes - Bwana ☠

Twitter is king. - Ernie Oporto

??? I'm confused. Did someone delete a comment, Charlie? - Mona Nomura

I don't mean to paint everyone on Twitter as "lazy" or stupid or anything. I don't need the Twitterati Army breathing down my neck. Their software is inferior, but their numbers are great....LOL - Rah-PM 2012

HAHA @ Rah! I just don't think (for the bajillionth time repeating this) a service that requires a 3rd party app to be intuitive is useful. But again, Twitter IS the pioneer :) - Mona Nomura from fftogo

Ok, I'll do it Rah. /me paints everyone on Twitter as "lazy" - Bwana ☠

LOL, better watch out, Bwana. - Rah-PM 2012

What app you talkin about, Mona? Twhirl? - Rah-PM 2012

Ya just gotta love Saturday nights on FF - It's a whole different deal - Charlie Anzman

Anything to manage @ replies and DMs. Everything is all over the place and it's hard to keep up! Plus, for some odd reason, people are one sided and very elitist on Twitter. All that exclusion/exclusivity BS I HATE. Were all the same on the Internet. Pixels. - Mona Nomura from fftogo

Well said Mona .. now you're wanted in the Green room to introduce Mike http://friendfeed.com/e... - Charlie Anzman

What do you people have against Twitter. Twitter is great, it does what it is designed to do. And does it damn well most of the time. Sure it goes down sometimes but overall its excellent. - Mathew™ aka Youngblood

I agree, Matt. Twitter serves its purpose and for a free service, it's great. However, I don't think its design was made to handle volumes and myriad streams of conversations, thus needing various 3rd party applications to manage the information overload. And that is the sole reason I firmly believe it's unintuitive. Even people who WANT to be involved in their community, cannot, since it is near impossible to keep track of everything. Especially if you have 10k+ followers. To each their own :) - Mona Nomura from fftogo

True, it may have not been designed to handle such a large mass of users. But, I think that they have been doing a good job on fighting that issue. But, if you want to get really technical what it really boils down to is money. You have to have A LOT of money to run any kind of social networking site. Especially when it becomes as popular as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. - Mathew™ aka Youngblood

Maybe that's the other beef. How can they have gotten so big and not made the money to keep the thing going? - Rah-PM 2012

Actually, I believe the inflexibility is more amongst the lines of Twitter based on RubyonRails, and the framework with a non proven track record to handle large-scale territory. :) Rails proved useful, since Twitter was able to be released quickly, but I truly think the dev team wasn't anticipating its popularity. With the new dev additions, I wonder if we're going to see Ruby at Apache anytime soon... But in the meantime, you can find me at Rejaw :) - Mona Nomura from fftogo

ugh, Sorry for the redundancy. It takes me a while to type on my phone LOL Matt, now that Twitter grabbed people's attentions, hopefully they WILL be granted the proper funding needed. It's just too bad that as great of a community Twitter DOES have, it seems extremely one sided, since information management is so inefficient. And to me, that's not ok. But again, to each their own :) - Mona Nomura from fftogo

geez. what if it were possible to connect with your twitter friends even if you preferred rejaw or ff? is rejaw going to peer with identi.ca? as soon as lockin is the main thing a tech product has going for it, i'm outta there, that's why you don't see me posting very often these days on twitter. - Dave Winer

Is that possible from a development standpoint? How would peering work? That concept sounds so incredible... - Mona Nomura

I'm listening. All we could do is to create a superior product, and to keep the faith that the better experience will spread little by little. It could take months or years to reach the tipping point, but that's okay as long as it keeps growing. We heart you guys - our community. We heart how our community is developing on Rejaw. - Kenn Ejima

By the way, I understand that some people want things like peering, federation, or standard, whatever it means... because you have too many alternatives out there. I know it's just overwhelming. But from a developer's perspective, it's ridiculously early to start even thinking about that. Integrating Rejaw with identi.ca is like integrating IM with email. As you go higher in the abstraction, you'd find a point that you could say they are identical - both serve messaging after all. I'm not saying integrating them is technically impossible, but that doesn't mean it makes sense in the real use, either. But, I could be wrong. That's why we provide the full set of API since the day one. In the development process, we fiercely discuss every little feature addition. We live with lots of vehement disagreements pending in four of us. I can't imagine what it could be like if we have to deal with more people, like some standardization committee, etc. So, we keep our focus - better user experience and simplicity. - Kenn Ejima

Thank you, Kenn, for taking the time to respond. I still can't believe there are only four of you behind that entire site... - Mona Nomura

It's always great to see a developer answering questions here, especially this early in the game. Thanks Kenn for dropping by and keep up the good work! - Charlie Anzman