This is really interesting as a tech project, but I do think this is going to be hard to make money from. App.net tried almost exactly the same thing, to the sa

This is really interesting as a tech project, but I do think this is going to be hard to make money from. App.net tried almost exactly the same thing, to the same audience (the twitter/fb diaspora), and as you can see from the comments below most developers are not going to pay good money to broadcast their thoughts, which they rightly see as worth very little. There is a two sided market for microblogs like twitter: * Broadcasters - An org or a prominent person who wishes to broadcast to a group of followers * Consumers - people who want to read the latest about x (where x is a hobby, a professional interest, a person, or a group of people) Making money from consumer blogs is incredibly hard, unless you're free and infested with ads, which has its own downsides. I don't think you'd be able to build a sustainable business from that. However those who do find it a useful medium for broadcasting to followers and actually use it professionally would be willing to pay (far more than $5 a month), if the service was tailored to their needs and had better curation controls etc, giving users control over their own feed and followers. This kind of service can forgo ads but it needs to find a market that wants to buy a broadcasting service, not attempt to market to normal consumers, who simply won't pay any amount for a blogging service. There are plenty of people using twitter to broadcast and research (for example journalists, businesses, ) - those are the people to target.