The company itself states that they created this project to be like Twitter “before it turned into a media company.“ The goal is to raise $500,000 by Monday, August 13th at 11.59pm PDT. The money is being collected from donations, and every one can participate in it. If you donate $50 you will be able to access the service for one year,get your current Twitter username befor e the project deadline passes or request preferred username if it's available. For a $100 you get everything that comes with a $50 donation plus a developer tool chain (API key generation, documentation, API analytics dashboard, developer feedback and support community), and for a donation of $1000 you get a personal meeting with Dalton (and everything included from a smaller donations).
So far many tech industry “celebrities“ have supported App.net and with it is closer to achieving the planned goal. At the time of this writing they have received $417750 of the needed $500,000 so it is very likely that they real their goal (and perhaps more). If you want to support this service you can do that on https://join.app.net/.
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