I started using Twitter 3+ years ago. Mostly I have used it to stay in contact with fellow Drupal developers. It has been both fun and useful. Now I have deleted all but two tweets and will most likely post no more. I keep the account for some time for the direct messaging functionality.

The main problem with Twitter for me is that I’m not their customer, I’m there product. This is true of all services where advertising is the primary source of revenue. Add to this Twitters increasingly hostile attitude towards third party clients and recent API changes and I’m out.

For now I’m moving to App.net. It’s a new service that started out at 50 USD per year put has already lowered the price to 38 USD per year, or 5 USD per month. A developer account cost 100 USD per year.

App.net business model is to sell the “pipes” and let developers build services on top of it. For now it’s more or less a Twitter replacement but it has the potential to be a lot more (Dan Wineman).

I think that in 2013 we will see a lot of the active Twitter users move to App.net and other similar services. They are a tiny minority of all Twitter users but they are plenty enough to make App.net a successful company. Twitter will be left with the celebrities and their millions of followers and may find some way of making that a good business as well.

Most of the current 20000+ users on App.net are developers. There are already 10+ iOS apps as well as apps for Android and Windows Phone, desktop applications, web services etc. Directory of third party devs and apps for App.net.

It will be very interesting to see what services are built on top of App.net!

P.S. The character limit on App.net is 256. You can make s lot more sense in 256 chars than in 140.