So open-standards don't matter? While they haven't given their source for their backend, they've been pretty open about how it's built, plus they've open source

So open-standards don't matter? While they haven't given their source for their backend, they've been pretty open about how it's built, plus they've open sourced several pieces of their platform (Omega, Pourover, Ohe). App.net is for the general consumer that's not going to be able to run their own server stack. If you can run your own server stack, you can use all these open standards outlined in this blog posts to consume the data and do what you like. There's even a http://dev-lite.jonathonduerig.com/ http://dev-lite.jonathonduerig.com/ so you don't need to pay anything to tinker with their API.