Hey Paul,

Great post and I have to agree that Twitter has its shortcomings when it comes to conversation (and not to mention its outages) since yep, you’re right, it isn’t really designed for that purpose. It was designed to be a “What are you doing” tool, which is what I use it for mostly.

There are great alternatives out there and many for that matter with even better features than Twitter. But to get people to change to use one of these alternatives as their main online presence tool is difficult. I am sure that people who have a huge influence and online presence like Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte will have some influence to affect change since they have a huge number of followers, but in the end, I personally, don’t want to monitor ANOTHER presence tool and I doubt that current Twitter’ers will change to another tool in one foul swoop very easily.

Pity though, you’ve tried most of them and there are other tools that are far superior then Twitter.