> We get it... the ad model is broken, a subscription model is, in theory, always better... However, I don't think the app.net experiment will succeed. I agree

> We get it... the ad model is broken, a subscription model is, in theory, always better... However, I don't think the app.net experiment will succeed. I agree that if App.net succeeds it will be construed as a data point for this line of reasoning, but I think Dalton's business experiment should be regarded as independent of his technical experiment. Things fail for lots of reasons, not just because free is better than paid. > - If it does succeed, twitter could just copy you. By that logic, MySpace could have just copied Facebook. > - App.net will not have a good one-player or even two-player mode (good 1-player: DropBox, Github, Evernote). That seems like a given, but I wonder if it's a foregone conclusion that App.net will turn into the same kind of thing as Twitter. After all, technically there isn't a huge difference between HN and Reddit, but the way they're used is very different. Even cultural differences can be dramatic. I haven't invested in App.net, but I do find myself toying with the idea of having something I could use like Twitter, but without being Twitter, and I admit I find the idea attractive. If I could control whether the messages are public or private, I could see using it as a pub/sub framework if the payloads were essentially encoded API messages. That's not something I'd be inclined to try out with Twitter, even though it's free. I guess I'm saying subtle differences can be meaningful; maybe they can be the difference between success and failure.