New competitors like Yappd (which so far really isn’t much to speak of at all, by the way) and Pownce are moving fast on Twitter’s market.

After getting a new round of funding in the last month, however, Twitter has started going down again in the last day or two. Sometimes it will work through an app but not through the front page, sometimes nothing loads, it’s all very unpredictable. I am not very pleased about this, as I had started using the service again more.

For now, I’m this close to stopping. But I like Twitter–the bird logos are great for any aviary enthusiast such as myself and the name and constant short sharing of random thoughts, sometimes with people you know and often with others–these are custom designed for someone with my personality.

It could be said that Twitter is a time waster, but that’s not too serious a concern for anyone who could throw off 140 words of the top of his head easily and is using the 140 character text entry field that Twitter allows. It’s very convenient to post to Twitter, and messages have to be short, so normally all I would do would be just pop open a chat window in Gmail or open a widget in Netvibes, type in my quip, and go back to reading my email or checking my feeds.

Once the site stops working, though, the time wasting factor kicks in with a vengeance. I’m checking my profile page to see if it has my latest update. I’m wondering if my hordes of Gmail filters are failing to properly direct tweets from friends when the tweets just aren’t coming in by IM. I log into Facebook to see if tweets are being added to my mini-feed. I go to my web page and it loads slowly as the Twitter updates widget chokes.

None of this should really matter, but for a Twitter addict this can seem a maddening process. The economy of the Twitter message length–the text-messaging-friendly 140 character limit–also imbues those short messages with their own elevated importance in the fevered mind of the Twitter user.

I’ve been using Pownce and Jaiku a bit, and I like them fine, but instead of looking for a real replacement for Twitter I should reach back to my old posts and bring back the idea of being a Qwittr.

Pownce has some really nice features, but what it needs right away is a first-party blog widget and Facebook app, and customized home pages. (Maybe for the pro package at least? Might interest a lot more people.)

It doesn’t seem like many people use Jaiku as their main updates service anymore but it is able to accept RSS feeds from the user’s other sites and that feature seems to have become the key part of Jaiku’s formula–many people, for example, send their Twitter feed to Jaiku so people following them on either get the message, but on the Jaiku feed you might also see the user’s recent Last.fm listens and del.icio.us bookmarks or blog entries. The ongoing stream of the user’s content works much the way a tumbleblog does in practice for many–and an additional feature on Jaiku is the ability to comment and follow others.

Yappd I cannot say very good things about. I just heard about it and decided to try it, and have just found that it does not allow perma-links for individual notes. This is not a good feature, and its lack of widgets and overall Twitter-copy feel did not seem to cover much new territory. Maybe it will add some new features and take off but for now it’s definitely back in the pack.

Yappd doesn’t even allow their vaunted add-a-picture feature for web-based updates, only via email or SMS. Overall it doesn’t seem like a fully developed offering. The pictures are supposed to be their big differentiator, but then recently people like Dave Winer have started using Twitter as a “coral reef” for Flickr photos anyway, so not much at all makes Yappd stand out at the end of the day now. I’ve been looking at some of the debate about whether the market spewing out such lackluster lookalikes is a sign of a financial bubble in the web 2.0 space, and I personally still think it is.

But the latest tulip over-valuation has to come some time, cyclically speaking. The new social and economic phenomenon symbolized by Twitter, however, is generating much discussion on the future of media and telecommunications and gaining broader notice.

My take on all the talk about how shortening the message to 140 characters makes one concise is a very skeptical one, however. People who congratulate themselves for all their great writing just become more appreciative of each of their own words. Yes, in some ways Twitter seems to symbolize the isolation and narcissism that gnaws at the guts of so many titans of tech culture and their copious followers and wannabes.  And it symbolizes a backlash against blogging, yes, the same way tumbleblogging does–for many seem to be relieved of the pressure of producing so many words or managing that sidebar.  And it can symbolize the lonely challenge of the pioneer–many tech early adopters have jumped on Twitter but haven’t yet had many of their friends join in.

Those are all fascinating angles, but I think what Twitter symbolizes is the re-learning of basic PC tasks going on with the techie set because of the popularity of mobile devices from iPhones to Blackberries, Treos and other cell phones to PSPs. Twitter scales blogging back ten years, just as most of those devices take the user interface back about that long.