This really makes no sense to me. Orian says that "App.net is a service dedicated to providing a new infrastructure for social web applications that will never

This really makes no sense to me. Orian says that "App.net is a service dedicated to providing a new infrastructure for social web applications that will never be funded through ad revenue....App.net has publicly declared that their most valuable asset is their users’ trust." But then he goes on to say: "A fundamental misunderstanding about the App.net platform so far has been that there will never be any ads running anywhere on the platform. I believe that is incorrect. What is correct is that there will never be any ads run on Alpha or anywhere else to fund the the operations of App.net the company." It sounds to me that if things go the way Orian says, app.net will be fundamentally the same thing as AWS, where developers pay a service provider to make their life easier. The difference will be that in app.net's case, "concepts like users, posts, connecting and sharing" will be supported through "a scalable infrastructure and a base model". But economically, the forces will be exactly the same. Application creators will be motivated to create free apps just as they are today, and to support them by advertising, just as they are today. And in order to earn advertising revenue that enables them to compete with their non-app.net competition, they'll want to target advertisements as efficiently as possible. So they'll have the same pressures to play games with user privacy. The end result will be that app.net WILL be funded through ad revenue, to the same degree that AWS is, since the developers that pay for either of these services often make their revenues through advertising. I don't see how the outcome will be any different from the traditional one from the user privacy point of view, unless app.net provides fundamental privacy restrictions that are rigid enough that these businesses can't compete financially with businesses not running on app.net, which doesn't sound like a viable model for app.net. While I have paid my $50 to sign up for app.net, I'm not exactly feeling a lot of confidence in this model. But I haven't spent an enormous time studying it, and maybe I'm missing something fundamental. If so, what is it?