For the last week Twitter has been mostly unusable.  While it's been possible to "tweet" it hasn't been possible to view replies, and now you can't see "older" posts.  While twitter hasn't become a staple in my life yet, I can see with some recent changes in my life me relying on it, or something similar, for communicating with others.  Twitter has proven time and time again that it isn't up to the challenge of being a service that we can rely on for much of anything.  I've given some other services a try to see what might be able to take the place of twitter, and I'm starting to form an opinion on what I think may be our best path forward.

I've developed a 6 step plan for removing twitter from our lives.

Step 1: Sign up for friendfeed, and add all the online services you use to your account
Step 2: Sign up for tumblr (or some other microblogging service) where you can post the things you normally post to twitter.  Another option would be to just use the "share something" feature of friendfeed for what you normally use twitter for.
Step 3: Take advantage of all the other services friendfeed supports and use those services for what they're good at.  For links use delicious or magnolia, for photos use flickr or smugmug, in short use the services that you like the most and use friendfeed as the central hub where you can view everything you and your friends are doing online.   
Step 4: Use friendfeed for viewing your "friends" activity stream, and allow it to become the central place that you communicate with your "friends".
Step 5: If you've become reliant on desktop client for interacting with twitter, download twirl or AlertThingy and set it up with your friendfeed account.
Step 6: Enjoy life without twitter

Sound good?