Weekly Poll: Did You Ever Try App.net?

Twitter continues to be the rising star in social networking, as businesses have latched onto it for its marketing power as an open network. Open, that is, as in public, not as in easy to develop for. 3rd party developers have continued to have trouble with Twitter, which has added user limits and other restrictions to their apps, making it rather obvious that Twitter wants its own apps to be the only full Twitter apps out there. There’s still plenty of apps that work with Twitter, but they’re mostly only for quick sharing to Twitter, and the development of full 3rd party Twitter apps has dropped dramatically.

What has increased are the 3rd party alternatives to Twitter, and the development of apps for them. Most notable has been App.net, the paid social network that’s strikingly similar to Twitter, only with a 256 character limit on posts and no ads. I joined during its initial funding stage last year, wrote about it here, and have continued to use it since daily at @maguay. It works great, though is still very similar to Twitter and continues to be interesting because of the people that are using it more than anything. It’s a friendly, helpful, techie community, though that’s because of the people on it, not the underlying tech.

I was wondering if any of the rest of you are using App.net. Have you tried it, and if so, what are your thoughts on the network?