These things seem to be win/win/win for the providers and angst/angst/angst for wannabe collaborators.
Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but when spread out or divided among the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. You won't hear Apple give you the breakdown as that will expose them and destroy the wrong picture they want to paint to developers. Neither will they tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut, off your work and yet countless app developers are not making enough to live on.
They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo...
http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail...
I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without making your business model entirely dependent on them and that is the way to go.
Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...
It's a marketplace; why would anyone expect the profits to be shared among the vendors? Saying there is a lot of money changing hands is not dishonest.
You can even throw LinkedIn into this group (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/06/21/linkedin-shuts-do...).
The main aggravation/issue stems from developers wanting to use these APIs to gain access to users without fully qualifying the risks. I could easily be building a fantasy sports app on Facebook thinking, "they won't EVER get into this market. They have much bigger problems to solve." 2 years later, they get into the space and shut me down because I am a competitor.
These "wannabe collaborators" are not trying to improve the experience on said platform. They are trying to gain access to a vast database of users with low barriers of entry and an easy to use(/abuse) marketing channels. It's unfortunate that no one has the foresight into understanding where a company as large as Facebook/LinkedIn/etc may pivot into, but only insiders really have first hand knowledge of this sort of thing.
I see app.net as a project/product by someone spurned by closed systems hoping to build a more open and egalitarian system, but it still is centralized. There is a leap of faith to believe that this goodwill will not alter over time (as business needs change, etc.).
Ideally, I'd love to see something more in line w/ what Dave Winer has proposed -- decentralized services not controlled by a single entity and the like. However, Diaspora was one such attempt in that arena and did not do well.