Right now, the conversation on Twitter is all about how Twitter sucks, and how everyone is moving their conversations to FriendFeed. The growing anti-Twitter movement seems to have reached a crescendo in the last week as they disabled the Replies feature to deal with their architecture issues, shutting down the conversational nature of Twitter.

I have to ask what the big deal is.

The genius of Twitter is that it’s never been about Twitter.com. I can use it from IM (losing IM has been far more debilitating to conversation on the service than Replies, though thankfully we have Twhirl), any number of desktop clients, any syndicate my stuff to it using Twitterfeed. If a service on Twitter.com fails, there are numerous others, like Quotably and Summize that can pick up the slack. Its API has been Twitter’s saving grace during its time of difficulty.

Mad about losing Replies? Set up a Summize search for your handle or your real name. This actually works a lot better than Twitter’s native Replies feature because it captures any tweet that mentions you, rather than just the ones prefixed with your name.

But the main reason I can’t brook switching to FriendFeed is the sunk cost of building up my Twitter network, and the fact that FriendFeed is still mostly for elite tech blogger groupies. I now have 898 followers on Twitter, and my posts still generate far more conversation on Twitter than they do on FriendFeed. That’s because most of my followers are interested in politics, and political users aren’t (yet) over on FriendFeed. As I’ll explore later in this post, I think there’s a good reason for that.

Don’t get me wrong. I think FriendFeed is a wonderful idea. Heck, I am Barack Obama and John McCain on FriendFeed. And as someone who was building aggregators back in 2005, I had long wondered when someone would build something like it. But at the end of the day that’s the problem: it still feels an aggregator more than a place for conversation. The value proposition behind FriendFeed is that it lets you message Twitter style, with in-line comments, and bring in your activity streams from places like Digg, del.icio.us (which is really falling by the wayside), Facebook, Flickr, and any number of social sites.

Though FriendFeed adds value for those of us with accounts on every site, most people — particularly more mainstream and political users — have one or maybe two social media accounts (usually Facebook and Twitter). They don’t need FriendFeed because Twitter (with maybe a little Twitterfeed thrown in) does everything they need it to do. Because adoption of social bookmarking sites is so much greater among tech users, they need an aggregator. Most average Twitter users don’t.

In fact, I’d argue that Twitter as a concept is far more elegant (and sticky) than FriendFeed. Tell us what you’re doing, in 140 characters or less. That’s it. It’s so open ended, users and developers can hack it into whatever they want — and they have. A third party application ecosystem developed faster around Twitter than FriendFeed because the idea behind it was much more necessary for mainstream users. FriendFeed solves certain issues for advanced users, but as Pownce learned, adding more frills does not make a successful app and the KISS principle very much applies to commercial web application development.

Twitter may still fail and go the way of Friendster, but I still dig the elegance behind the initial model, and I hope its putative successor doesn’t  lose sight of that.