Twitter is up and down, is it time for something new?

I have only been using Twitter for a short time now, maybe the last couple months, but I have gotten used to it and it has become valuable, as I have mentioned previously.

I use it to communicate with friends and people I have met in the industry, talk about work and help each other out.  It has really become semi-private chat group and really quite effective.

Recently, I seem to get this a bit too often:

I am not the only one complaining.  Sure, the service is free so what do I have to complain about?  I certainly would pay a monthly fee if there would be a guarantee.

Dave Winer over on Scripting.com had a nice post about a Decentralized Twitter, which may in fact be a good idea.  Some people said decentralized Twitter is just IRC.  I think there is more to Twitter than what IRC offers and it therefore would have more to offer if it was decentralized.  Moving much of the responsibility to the client in a nice user interface like my new found favorite Twitter client Twhirl, would be a nice way to avoid relying on the Twitter service being up all the time.  I think it might be something like peer-to-peer file sharing but peer-to-peer messaging instead. 

The more and more users rely on Twitter and it’s not there, it will force users to go elsewhere.  Pownce is an alternative and one with a nice UI and allows users to do a bit more.  Pownce will also connect to services like Twitter and import your friends.  Pownce has recently come out of private beta.

Twitter did recently get some funding and maybe we can expect some updates to increase the reliability with some of that money.  The folks who run Twitter do not do a great job of letting users know their plans. 

Should we all move to Pownce