While I disagree with much of what is said in the article, I think this is an important point:
And the best services tend to sprout from the best
entrepreneurs. And the best entrepreneurs eventually realize
they need to build the best businesses, lest their services
die or worse — linger in mediocrity.
We need another Richard Stallman or another Linus Torvalds for the internet age. This time, however, it's going to be much harder for such people to appear because in this day and age it seems like it's easier to make a lot of money from software - you don't need to build another Microsoft - so software developers are much more easily tempted.
Yes that quote was key to the whole article. If you subscribe to the view that success is defined by scale, then pretty much everything he said follows logically from that.
Of course we know that App.net will not compete with Twitter on volume. But leave it to a guy with a blog titled Massive Greatness to assume that's the only thing an A-player would want to do. One has to wonder what would happen to MG Siegler exposed to the Apple of the mid 80s if his Apple fanboyism was forced to confront his idea that greatness is by definition massive.
As for giant figures like Linus or RMS, remember, Linus is still around, and the work he does creates more value than probably any single company, because his software is everywhere. Probably 95% of all companies are realizing some value from the existence and maintenance of Linux. The economics of this work because the work he does is just manipulating a small number of bits and publishing those changes for everyone to take advantage of. The economics of this are completely different from running a service where costs scale linearly with adoption. There have been many attempts to make distributed versions of Twitter to gain the economics of open source, but a centralized service is too valuable.
What Dalton is doing here is seeing if he can create something sustainable for developers that has the benefits of a centralized service without the risk of users being outbid by advertisers. It doesn't have to go anywhere near Twitter to be a massive success. Just validating the business model at a small scale will already be producing proportionately orders of magnitude more value than the huge volumes of banal shit floating through Twitter's tubes.
