What, expect consistency from the likes of Twitter? Their new ad rules are guaranteed to upset people, and so far they have:

My instant review of Twitter's new business plan. (Scripting News)

The biggest difference between an open platform and a corporate-owned platform — he can change the rules after we've all invested. With an open platform, you know the rules when you start, and they can't be changed later.

Or, better to say the only practical way to change the rules is to do so in a parallel iteration of what you're already doing. But I suspect it's going to take multiple rounds of being screwed by the likes of FaceTwitTubeSite LLC before realize just how tough the tradeoffs really are. Your convenience or your privacy, you choose which one you wanna give up more of. (Nobody describes Facebook as a social ad platform, but maybe it would be more universally honest if we did.)

What I would like to see more of is substitutes for Twitter and Facebook that are built more along the model of the original iteration of LiveJournal. The one big restriction is how many people can join the service and use it, with expanded service capacity given to those who buy it. Or the Flickr model: a not-too-crippled basic tier of service (with no ads), and a totally unlocked for-pay version. (Although I suspect a good deal of Flickr's subsidies come from Yahoo! at this point, so that probably sinks them as a model for such things.)

The problem, of course, is that if such things only scale modestly well, then they're not businesses that present enough growth to be attractive. They're curiosities in the minds of most businesspeople, not the masters-of-the-universe that TwitTubeBook are.

Is it really impossible to want a web that isn't just one giant ad-rotation platform?

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