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Can someone tell me what app.net is? From the original description I figured it was some sort of "user feed as a service", but they seem to have actual users too, so I'm not sure what it is.

As a developer, I take not understanding what a developer-oriented service is as a bad sign for said service. Can someone elucidate?

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It's just a Twitter clone, that charges users for membership, instead of monetizing them through ads or selling their data. A lot of people think that will lead to a better service, so it got a lot of hype recently.

Hmm, that's disappointing, especially after the initial post that was about Twitter's potential to become the web's real-time feed API.

The twitter clone is a proof of concept. A better description would be that its a paid social graph designed to be used by third party apps. Just like Facebook apps or apps that use twitter to sign on, app.net can be used as that identity- the difference being that app.net is promising not to put arbitrary restrictions on how it is used.

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