Because it makes Dalton Caldwell money. At least, that's the reason Caldwell would give you.
If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on status.net, or at least something open source.
> If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on status.net, or at least something open source.
I disagree.
When making a business, your paying customer is the one you serve. If App.net goes for charging users and developers, they'll (logically) focus on those exact people.
I disagree with your disagreement. Caldwell just wants to make money (and the glory) Nothing wrong with that. I want to make money too first and foremost :)
Identica (StatusNet) is open source and federated. For some people, those are negatives. The "walled garden" approach is a very attractive business model.
The answer, for me, is simple: there are a good number of people I follow on Twitter that are endorsing app.net, which indicates that they likely intend to use it of it gets funded. The same can't be said for any other Twitter-like service (other than Twitter, of course).
I don't understand why the founders "need" funding. If they have such a great business model and already have an alpha, then can't they bootstrap? If the idea is so good, then people should be just dying to sign up and give their credit card numbers. I mean, aren't people just dying to pay these guys $50?
I don't know their real answer, but I thought of it as a psychological experiment; people are much more likely to join a social service if it already seems to have lots of users.
This experiment provides a huge number of people a way to say "well, if there were actually X people on the service then sure, I'd also become a dedicated user". If they hit their goal, all those people will have paid enough that they feel emotionally attached to justifying their decision via using the service.
It just might work. A service doesn't need to have EVERYONE, it just has to have enough people to be more interesting for all its participants than the alternative.
I think the more important note is that if they don't hit the goal, all those people won't have paid anything.
Whereas without this fundraising period, the first people in are going to say "I'm the first person in, if I pay $50 there's nobody else to talk to", and... then nobody becomes the first to pay it. (Well not nobody, but few people.)
identi.ca's global feed is a little messier, but not much (it also has more functionality, and although it's a matter of taste, I like the design). They seem to be about equally active, although identi.ca has users posting in multiple languages and they seem to not have bothered to split posts by language. Neither site has ads.
