My Twitter usage has ramped up consistently since I first registered in late 2006. But now, one of the most exciting adventures about it is this: in what ways will Twitter fail today? For the past three months, Twitter users have grown accustomed to daily instances of “stress,” “overload,” faulty API limits exceeded, and random appearances of the now infamous fail whale. Many have forecast the demise of Twitter as if it is reminiscent of the second Web bubble itself and even while the weekend bitchmeme virtually handed the king-of-all-internets crown from Twitter to Friendfeed over the weekend, it’s just not so. Twitter isn’t going away and neither are it’s users. And that’s after many weeks of people like me wondering why and how we still manage to put up with a service that reminds us on a regular basis that we really don’t (or rather, can’t) depend on addictive web 2.0 tools wholly and exclusively. Perhaps it’s that reminder that we appreciate the most.

This morning’s Twitter fail is: I saw nothing at http://twitter.com/home until a few refreshes delivered Andrew Mager‘s latest tweet as distributed via ping.fm. Twhirl is experiencing API limit exceeded after only a few minutes operation which is indubitably bogus. The sharp, new Tweetdeck even quit delivering new tweets 20 minutes ago.

Could this be the long-awaited rebirth of Twitter as stable application day? We can only hope so.

I tried Plurk a couple weeks back for a day. Returned on the following two days and have not returned since. There are way too many of these types of services and they don’t dynamically reflect and refract as they should. Same reason I latched onto FriendFeed as opposed to the — possibly more attractive and fun to use — SocialThing. But what IS interesting is that — according to Google Trends’ calculations, Plurk.. in only a few weeks… has set a higher trend base/level than Friendfeed — whether this is because friendfeed is widely accessed via third party apps such as Facebook, Twhirl, and AlertThingy, I’m not sure. But what is interesting is that it appears to be quite sticky and in Brazil and Taiwan is already out-“trending” Friendfeed.

It also must be said that one reason for the boost in Twitter’s visits is not necessarily a good reason — it’s suffered from frequent downtime and poor performance in recent months with daily outages and appearances of the “fail whale” becoming an expected part of the experience. Which apparently has developers on the run. But, alas, no news is bad news, right?

Just throwing these thoughts out there. I’m personally not a huge fan of Plurk (they encourage addictiveness by virally spreading “karma” and expressing “emo-ness” after all) and am not hyping it. I do think you can deduce that Plurk’s rate of adoption was likely hastened by its release soon after a relatively short pre-beta phase and it’s stable cache of unique features, not to mention decent uptime.

Still, I’m a Twitter guy all the way. I do think there will be a Twitter-killer someday, but it won’t be a “killer” it will be an open and malleable interface incorporating the best of all micro-blogging functions.

Originally posted at LAist.