[PaulHoule]

It's more like Salesforce.com than it is like Twitter in terms of business model -- that's interesting.

Will it work though?

SFDC started out with a product that had clear enough value to sell seats at $60+ a month and then there was a large market for apps built on top of their platform. And note that if you sell somebody an app in Salesforce, you're adding something to their recurring bill.

App.net sounds like an "all you can eat" service in terms of back-end hardware and software, a bit like cable TV, in fact, it's at the low end of that price range.

It may be very possible to build something interesting on here but so far all I see are a number of instant messaging clients, particularly for the Mac.

Show me a tool that can be used to build a social system that gets people to do something that they otherwise don't do then I'll be impressed!

[tg3]

Your Salesforce analogy also reminds me of Heroku - they sell you on the core product, which is hosting, but they have a large enough market that they can invite 3rd parties to develop apps (Add-ons in Heroku's parlance) for their users.

I think App.net is missing that "Killer App" that brings people to the platform in the first place. Perhaps they were thinking that would be Alpha, but it doesn't seem to be working so well.