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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

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davidw·

The question is: what is most valuable to most people?

* Having a slightly nicer experience

* Having all their friends and potential friends on the same service

For a social service, door number 2 (positive network externalities) would be my guess.

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I don't really disagree with you, but you've editorialized door number 1 to make the answer more obvious. Door number 1 is a different experience (because of the points listed in the post you replied to), which may be any of "slightly nicer", "slightly less nice", "way nicer", or ????. The point is that it will be different, whether that difference provides more or less value than ad-supported alternatives remains to be seen.

The big thing that I can see is "no ads", which would make it slightly nicer. I think we can presume that if it, say, just plain sucks, there's nothing even to discuss! So for the sake of argument it's going to be 'better'. You're right that it could be way better - but Facebook isn't completely blind to its users desires - they could likely copy a lot of what makes it good. Outside of 'no ads', of course. So I wrote 'a bit better', which to me seems the most probable.

Facebook often makes choices (like the default security settings) that are obviously not in the users' best interests. Twitter has a proven track record of using policy to ruin services built with its API. These are the kinds of things app.net hopes to avoid. I think.

It is a good idea, although I don't see myself using it.

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