You would think that the rival to Twitter could have thought of a better name than App.net, ADN, especially when it is positioning itself as a place for the elite. To get full use of ADN you have to pay to be a user of it, but now there is another way in through the freemium model. It has been recently introduced into ADN that you can join and have up to 40 followers for free. In a lot of ways the growth of this service as a paid service needs to have some way of inviting new members in and freemium certainly has been instrumental in getting me to try it out.
Who is using ADN
What is it like to use ADN
One of the biggest differences is that you get 256 characters to work with. Obviously this is going to promote the ability to have intelligent chats with other users. So while Twitter lends itself to the short and pithy, ADN will give you the opportunity to string together proper sentences. You will be able to have sentences that will not need to be murdered grammatically to fit within the 140 characters of Twitter. For this I will be very thankful to app.net.
The temptation to become a full member of ADN
As of yet, I have not used the service for long enough to know whether I am likely to want to stump up the cash for the full paid version. The cost is 5 dollars a month or 36 dollars for a whole year, which actually seems to be quite reasonable. The reason why this could be better than using Twitter, could be that you are safe in the knowledge that you are a customer of a service rather than the product of that service. So whereas Twitter and Facebook are in the business of selling your data to those that would like to advertise to you, there is none of that with ADN.