The quality of content in a community is always higher when the community is smaller. Twitter conversations in the early days were all high-quality, too.
Social networks live and die by whether your friends are on them, though, and while I get the appeal of "keeping out the riff-raff", I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that you can reach critical mass (without which your product will fail) by charging for a product that people are used to getting for free.
If the team can reach critical mass, then awesome. But I think that it's going to be nearly impossible to sell to anyone but the subset of the early-adopter crowd who have a bone to pick with Facebook and Twitter, which is a very passionate, but very limited audience.
App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue, so I think we can say it already hit critical mass. For App.net to succeed, it didn't need millions of users, because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising.
I also don't see it as a typical social network, but more like a publishing platform for short posts — a mix of a micro blog, link log and photo album. I'd rather compare App.net to Tumblr and Posterous than to Twitter. Also, if readers want to respond to posts, they can do so on their own blog or on Facebook or Twitter. Charging subscribers an annual fee might become the service's biggest strength. I think it guarantees that App.net will attract very little passive users, the ones who sign up will actually use it.
> App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue
Many of whom were backers who were sufficiently curious to pay to get access to / see the product. The real kicker will come at renewal time, and how many of those customers remain.
Social networks live and die by whether your friends are on them, though, and while I get the appeal of "keeping out the riff-raff", I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that you can reach critical mass (without which your product will fail) by charging for a product that people are used to getting for free.
If the team can reach critical mass, then awesome. But I think that it's going to be nearly impossible to sell to anyone but the subset of the early-adopter crowd who have a bone to pick with Facebook and Twitter, which is a very passionate, but very limited audience.