Microblogs, status update services... please listen up

I recently signed up with Rejaw, thus bringing the total number of micro-blogging/status-updating services I use up to something like seven. For the most part, I update them all simultaneously via Ping.FM - but Rejaw is brand new, so I had to whip together a quick script to allow me to update Rejaw from Ping.FM along with everything else. It's great that all of these services have APIs and tools that allow me to do stuff like that, but I wish it wasn't necessary.

All of these services have a very similar feature set:

• A means to post a short entry, usually a textarea and a button
• A means to reply to an entry, again just a textarea and a button
• A list of entries and replies
• A means to "follow" other users, eg subscribe to their entries

I think that about covers the basics. Now, if you look around at Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Rejaw etc, you might wonder why the textarea, button, and list provided by any one of these services is any more compelling than the same features on the other services. The answer is - it isn't.

Ping.FM addresses the box+button aspect of this by allowing you to update all of your services from a single location, and you can use RSS to aggregate timelines from the services in a single location, but you still need to jump around from one service to another to properly manage replies and subscriptions.

So - to the point... all of you microstatusblogamathings need to get together and come up with a way to do the following:

• Use some other service as a source for updates, and allow your service to be used in the same way. The textarea+button on your site is no better than the one on the other guy's site, so why should I be forced to use yours? Having my content on your site is what should matter to you - it shouldn't matter how it gets there. If you come up with some awesomely compelling feature that makes your textarea better than the others, fine... but have some basic standard that all of you guys can use to work together.
• Follow and reply to others, regardless of the service they choose as their "home" service, for the same reasons. Having this cross-site conversation visible on your site makes your site better, and it makes my life easier.

Now, do I think any of this will actually happen? Of course not. People have been making the same argument for interoperability in the context of instant messaging services for over a decade, and it still hasn't happened. But these new services are being built by a new generation of developers, so maybe they're a bit more open to this sort of suggestion than the giant corporations who control the IM services. Maybe it could happen.