What puzzles me is that the HN crowd seems to be the target audience for whatever it is App.net wants to do but Dalton & friends totally failed to get them interested enough even after so much posts here.
With Gruber they reached a different crowd and got the money, which may prove that they have something interesting on their hands but now they'll have do deal with different expectations from their users, and I'm highly skeptical it will make their strategy clearer.