GigaOM: There has been an interesting debate going on over the past week or so that gets to the heart of one of the deep-seated conflicts within the web-startup community: namely, whether apps and services are better when they are free or when users pay for them. Dalton Caldwell, the founder of Imeem, kicked things off by saying he is going to try to create a for-pay version of Twitter, and others cheered him on by saying that an advertising-based approach makes a lot of services less appealing than they could be. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, however, argued that free and ad-supported is actually the best model for consumer services that want to achieve a broad reach. So who is right? That depends.
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in the end of the day if there's a will there's a way.
if you pay for something and still end up getting pestered you wasted your money.
but only 1% of the population would pay for such a thing so you never knoww
"So would the App.net model, in which users would pay $50 per year for an account — money that would be shared with developers who built on the API, as Caldwell described in his latest post — be better than the way Twitter functions right now? "
most people dont even use twitter regularly anymore. its become quite stale. especially with tumblr and instagram stealing its shine and becoming more creative and colorful.