Not too long ago, I heard some news about an alternative to Twitter that was being released called App Dot Net. People were touting it as a superior service because it required people to pay to use the service and as such, did not have ads. Its terms of service were such that you retained rights to all of the content that you put on the platform. I had thought about joining to see what it would be like, but the initial price was $50 per year, which is a little steep for a service I don't really profit form in any way.
Recently, they did two things to make the service more attractive-- they dropped the price to $36 and they added a free service tier with the limitations that you must be invited by a paying member and that you are limited to 40 followers. In order to get more people to use the service (social is not useful without people; see Google+), they appear to also have given popular bloggers more than the normal number of invites. A blogger and developer that I follow, Matt Gemmell, got a hold of around 800 of these invites and I decided to snag one.
Gemmel's Article goes on to explain why he finds the service more useful than Twitter. Among his reasons are the lack of spammers and the higher quality of discourse than on Twitter as well as the additional features and more open API. While Twitter is continually limiting 3rd party clients, ADN embraces them and even gives out money to app developers.
ADN also adds more features over Twitter. It is meant to be more than just a microblogging client. ADN also allows users to host other content. It allows for private chat rooms, more robust conversation threads, hosting for blogs and podcasts, as well as something of an RSS feed.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I will be evaluating the service and some of its apps. I will probably write a review at that time and decide whether I want to continue using the service and pay for a full account, or stop using the service altogether.
I decided to try Drift as my Android Client and Wedge as my desktop client.
You can find me on ADN as @Kihashi.