The incentives are A) to hedge against future developments of Twitter throwing you under the bus for $0.50 and B) joining a social network of people who explicitly value that network who you believe will have a generally higher signal to noise ration than the unwashed masses.
Today you can follow those 12 people, but if this takes off then it promises a return to the nostalgic '06 and '07 of Twitter when the community was small and everyone there was "interesting". The cognoscenti of tech may well abandon Twitter in favor of this un-walled, membership-only garden.
Now who really should care about this? Certainly not most people. It won't compete with Twitter, but it won't have to because it will have a fraction of the infrastructure costs, and it will avoid the eternal september that plagues every popular free service. This will be a niche product, but if successful it will potentially be highly valuable to that niche, and also it will be quite novel as a paid product of this type has never taken off as far as I know. If you really buy into the hype, you might even think that the success of app.net could signal the high water mark of free services as it becomes apparent just how much better a service can be created when it's paid for directly by users.
I'm not saying I believe any of this, but I do see the potential.
Point of information - the precursor example of a social networking product supported by users might be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL , which had a good 20 year run.
Today you can follow those 12 people, but if this takes off then it promises a return to the nostalgic '06 and '07 of Twitter when the community was small and everyone there was "interesting". The cognoscenti of tech may well abandon Twitter in favor of this un-walled, membership-only garden.
Now who really should care about this? Certainly not most people. It won't compete with Twitter, but it won't have to because it will have a fraction of the infrastructure costs, and it will avoid the eternal september that plagues every popular free service. This will be a niche product, but if successful it will potentially be highly valuable to that niche, and also it will be quite novel as a paid product of this type has never taken off as far as I know. If you really buy into the hype, you might even think that the success of app.net could signal the high water mark of free services as it becomes apparent just how much better a service can be created when it's paid for directly by users.
I'm not saying I believe any of this, but I do see the potential.