Do you accept bitcoin donations?
Not officially, though I do have my own personal bitcoin account. We're planning on accepting donations in general once we get a '1.0' release out there, so it's not discrimination against bitcoin: there's just no way to give us money right now.
The basic conecpt seems to be pretty much the same as far as I can see. But I think I'll give try anyone.
At least it looked a hell lot better than bot twitter AND identi.ca in my opinion.
The basic concept is the same, and we actually use the same protocol: this means that rstat.us users and identi.ca users can follow each other! Which is pretty sweet! (Though our standards support isn't 100% yet, we're very close...)
As for why? Well, we think we have a significantly cleaner and better interface. And we're working on some features that will differentiate us from them eventually, as well. We wanted to get the basics down first.
One of the other reasons we've done this is to add ostatus support to Ruby. We've broken out all of our standards implementations into libraries for others to use, so if any rubyists want to build an app that'll interpolate with us or identica or diaspora, they can do so, and easily.