If you’ve used Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that radically altered the way a lot of online communication takes place today, you’ll know that right at the top of the page, you get asked the question:

What are you doing?

Well, with the frequent downtime that Twitter has been plagued by, it seems more apt to be asking TWITTER the same question!

The service has over 1 million users. They recently raised funds with savvy folks like Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos investing in it. They’ve had a LOT of time to get things fixed.

Yet the ‘blue whale’ still keeps popping up often. (Twitter uses a once-cute image of a blue whale coming up for breath to indicate down-time. But, once too often makes it much less ‘cute’!)

Where you ‘tweet’ on Twitter, you ‘dent’ on Identi.ca - and in many ways, it is quite similar to Twitter… with one difference. Portability. If you have the tech smarts to do it, you can ‘take’ your network with you when you move to another service (at least, that’s how I understand it).

Right now, Identi.ca only has ‘early adopters’ - which means most of the conversation I’ve been listening to is ‘geek speak’ that floats over my head.

But if it scales nicely, and with an open-source platform that’s available to many minds to adapt and tweak that is quite likely, then possibly Identi.ca will become my preferred alternative to Twitter.

Of course, that’s only likely if Twitter doesn’t get its act together.

So, Twitter… What Are YOU Doing?