definitive items of the utmost unimportance

I’m a Twitter fan. I find myself using it more and more often, though I struggled for quite awhile to find a place for it in my life. That said, no user has gone unaffected by the struggles the popular service has gone through time and time again and even the most novice twitter(ers? ati?) are finding themselves frustrated.

Even with all of the hiccups, Twitter is insanely popular (a look at popular blog Techcrunch shows five seperate Twitter-related posts in the last three days alone). A quick search on Technorati returns 122,470 results while Techmeme comes back with 716 results, and Twitter’s trend history on Google Trends shows the quick rise to fame the service has gone through since late 2006:

Even with the popularity, or maybe due to it, Twitter has seen a particular strong bout of criticism over the last few weeks. Firings, unannounced downtime, and a willing-to-rebel blogosphere is putting the pressure on the relatively small company. Most recently, a pretty strong case of Twitter refusing to uphold their own ToS and, arguably, enabling harassment in the process has not helped them along.

So, with all of the negative chatter, why aren’t we seeing alternative options appear? Is it fear that Twitter has already sucked up all the money in it’s niche? We’ve seen similarly themed microblogging web apps appearing in the form of Pownce, Blip, even to some degree p0pulist, but each have their own niche and fail to challenge the mainstream presence of Twitter.

So, which startup is going to step up to the plate and push Twitter to improve or die? We’re waiting.