zlacker

Again, you answered in your first 3 sentences. The propsed absence of advertising on app.net will change how users interact with the service, as well as how the service grows.

Twitter and Facebook wants to market to their users. This now influences all of their product decisions! Any changes to the service aim to increase CPM. I won't debate whether that makes FB/Twitter better or worse, but they are fundamentally different than a product which does not seek, above all else, to raise money by advertising to its users.

Here are some ways in which a paid service might differ from an ad-based service:

(1) No ads means no B2B sales team, which means more money to hire developers.

(2) The product pipeline looks different without ads. Would Twitter have featured "Explore" so prominently if it wasn't a central hub for advertising? Would they have de-emphasized direct messages?

(3) Lower infrastructure costs and dev time related to scaling. A smaller user base, in this case, will require less supporting infrastructure and a simpler code base. Both of these save app.net money and dev time, allowing the team to focus on features.

(4) Analytics and research will have a different purpose. Instead of analyzing user behavior to identify ideal ad placement or selection, App.net will try to identify the best features and cull the worst in an attempt to keep users around.

>>achomp+(OP)
The question is: what is most valuable to most people?

* Having a slightly nicer experience

or

* Having all their friends and potential friends on the same service

For a social service, door number 2 (positive network externalities) would be my guess.

>>davidw+E1
I don't really disagree with you, but you've editorialized door number 1 to make the answer more obvious. Door number 1 is a different experience (because of the points listed in the post you replied to), which may be any of "slightly nicer", "slightly less nice", "way nicer", or ????. The point is that it will be different, whether that difference provides more or less value than ad-supported alternatives remains to be seen.

>>sander+F2
The big thing that I can see is "no ads", which would make it slightly nicer. I think we can presume that if it, say, just plain sucks, there's nothing even to discuss! So for the sake of argument it's going to be 'better'. You're right that it could be way better - but Facebook isn't completely blind to its users desires - they could likely copy a lot of what makes it good. Outside of 'no ads', of course. So I wrote 'a bit better', which to me seems the most probable.

>>achomp+(OP)
I have joined and paid $100 but my biggest concern is they are VC funded which is a more insidious position for someone to pressure them to do something not in line with the current vision. Also, there is a long line of startups that hate advertising at first then acquiesced when the only budget big enough to cover their burn rate are the ones advertisers have. This includes Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

>>davidw+Z2
Facebook often makes choices (like the default security settings) that are obviously not in the users' best interests. Twitter has a proven track record of using policy to ruin services built with its API. These are the kinds of things app.net hopes to avoid. I think.

It is a good idea, although I don't see myself using it.