A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

Yes. He's essentially affirming the conclusion that users only want free services.

Of course more users want free services, but that doesn't mean that some users don't want a premium service, and more importantly, that those users don't add a disproportionate amount of the network effect value to a microblogging service.

So I was thinking about this recently: do companies actually "sell" your personal details to advertisers?

A practical example: let's say I run a cooking website, where users log in and share recipes, vote and comment on them etc.

I (the site owner) store your votes, and comments, as well as track what recipes you view.

From this I (still the site owner) can learn things about you. If you're always viewing lots of chicken recipes, I an make the assumption you're a fan of chicken. I can also note that the recipes that you view and like are "upper class", requiring expensive ingredients.

Now an advertiser for a large Chicken producer could come to me, and want to advertise its new Free Range chickens. They (the advertiser) asks me to display an ad for all people who like chickens and like expensive tastes. So I (the site owner) do this, and you (a user) see the ad.

At no point has the advertiser learnt anything about my users, or had any direct knowledge of my users and their preferences. It's a completely one-way transaction.

So if I was writing a recipe website and I wanted to fund it with advertising, that's how I'd do it. I'd probably give some kind of iTunes dynamic playlist / email filter style UI where you get to pick the types of people your ad gets seen by, but at no point would the advertiser actually learn anything about those people.

Is this still considered "selling your personal details"? Or are companies like Facebook and (presumably) Twitter actually essentially handing over their DBs?

I think if anything the best thing about having a paid system is that you have one less person to make happy. Unless your ads are just a dropin (e.g. google ads) you have to have a marketing and sales team, and presumably a bunch of coding work has to go into making a backend for advertisers to upload their ads and decide who sees what and so on.

I do find it utterly useless.

If I'm buying a bike then I either already have a helmet, or already know I need to buy one. So what value is the ad providing?

I'm not going to blindly purchase something without doing at least a little research (to check prices, at the very least), so the ad is just getting in the way and wasting bandwidth.

I'm a bit surprised the comments here are so overwhelmingly critical. I think there's a legitimate point here, which is that the users paying money is not a silver bullet. It's not as if paid services don't make decisions that end up screwing users one way or another, not to mention the fact that subscription fees and ads are not always mutually exclusive (witness cable TV, newspapers, etc). In fact Twitter toed the line for years, building developer confidence and providing a solid platform. This is precisely the problem that App.net is addressing: Twitter appeared to be trustworthy but when push came to shove they decided to throw the developers under the bus because they had enough normals that they figured the developers and early adopters weren't necessary anymore.

The reason App.net is more trustworthy is because its founding principles are a direct response to this existential threat of advertising dollars subverting the platform. The paying users part is merely the explanation of how to make this company work, not the guarantee that they will do no wrong.