[xxxmadraxxx]

"...They seemed to think that the flaw with Twitter is that it's free. In my opinion, the flaw with Twitter is that it's centralized..."

The flaw that made me leave Twatter for App.net was the ever-increasing amount of stinking advertising [laughingly known as 'Sponsored Tweets' ] littering my stream, combined with the relentless barrage of spam emails from Twitter themselves.

Alpha offered everything Twatter did, as well as double length posts and without spamverts. Unfortunately [and I agree with previous comments on App.net's piss-poor marketting] few people even knew it existed.