As useful as many Web services can be, they’re not worth very much if they can’t stay online. In a way that’s a good problem to have because it probably means that their servers are being overloaded with traffic and they just can’t handle the load. At least, sometimes that’s part of the problem. It’s easy for startups to focus almost all of their energy on developing new features for their tools, but they can’t forget that the tools have to be able to scale properly. Twitter is an example of a fantastic online service that has been a victim of its own success. Twitter’s reliability has appeared to improve recently, but it’s been in bad shape for quite some time. Identi.ca is taking advantage of Twitter’s shortcomings to provide a new microblogging service. 

Although Identi.ca isn’t even close to having the number of users that Twitter has, it is open source and you can take your data with you. This means that you can start your own Identi.ca server and take control of your account. While Twitter holds your account hostage on its unreliable network, the distributed and decentralized approach that Identi.ca takes frees up everything, and with some further expected developments, the service could turn into something special.