I can’t say that I sympathize with Mr. Whitley’s plight. There are too many web 2.0 services (especially ones that seek to capitalize on the popularity of Twitter) that fail to recognize that the best way to serve the market is to treat their web application like a business. All businesses require resources in order to survive and continue to offer a quality service to their users. In this case the needed resource is money. What’s a guy to do? He’s got to do some research and find out what (if anything) the service is worth to users. Then he’s got to name a price (probably a monthly fee) and make the value proposition. If people don’t pay then he should polish his pitch or work on adding more value to the service. If that approach fails then it’s probably best to close it down or sell the code rather than offer something that is below standard.

It’s a harsh reality but one that all people who seek to offer services on the web need to come to terms with. In the end both the users and the developers are better off if such an approach is followed.

Thanks for that insight, Rob. With thinking like that, we’d all be sitting in the dark, waiting for Tommy Edison to finish fleshing out his electric distribution plan before investing in the development of an incandescent bulb.

Shannon never trumped this to be any more than it was: an experiment to see if something could be done.

He spread the info to a few friends to test out, and it turns out there is way more bandwidth to parse through for the few comments that trickle out. No big deal. Now he has a working prototype and an idea of what it would cost to scale it. No big deal.

Don’t think of Shannon as hanging his hand out asking for a free ride — way more have ridden on his coattails than vice/versa. He is simply communicating back to the people who were helping him test it, letting them know what it would take to make it work further.

I know the fly-by-night get-rich-quick internet culture… Shannon isn’t it.