What's people's general opinion on how we should pay for social networks, by the way?

I'm not so keen on the app.net model: I'm happy to pay for a service but I think I'd rather that it was free with ads and you pay to remove the ads, rather than all being behind a paywall. I think what I don't like about the app.net model as it stands is the air of exclusivity – you can make a conversation exclusive by simply having it privately with a few people, to get that effect if that's what your'e looking for. But by putting the paywall at the entrance, if you genuinely want to share something with everyone, even in a read-only way, you can't. (Unless app.net allows readonly statuses?)

I'm not sure you can have a financial model for a social network where you just 'pay to remove the adds' in any meaningful way. I *think* (in a Sunday Afternoon Not Really Thinking Very Hard kind of way) that the FB model relies on being able to charge advertisers not just on 'click through' but on 'impressions' where they've guaranteed a certain amount of relevance based on mining personal data. You could have an option to switch off the *display* of the ads -- but I'm not convinced you could have an option to switch off the use of your personal data for 'analysis' reasons.

I can't really see how a system where some people's data can be mined / sold, but other peoples' can't would work, so I think its all or nothing. Possibly.

Firstly, let me commend you on coining the amazing term 'add' for an advert that gets added to your social stream :)

So I don't think I care if my data is mined, so long as I don't see promoted stuff in my feeds. If a company wants to work out that in general people who talk about phones also talk about coffee, and so start to make cool phone-coffee holders, or billboards showing phones with coffee, I'm not sure I really care. As long as I can pay a small fee and not see an advert for CoffeePhone in my inbox.

[Obviously that was an intentional coinage (I refer my learned friend back to my SANRTVH status)]

I feel the opposite I think; I can mentally map out adverts quite well (within reason), and I can also write/get software to get rid of them (if mentally mapping them out fails), but I'd like to 'own' my data and have the right to revert / delete it etc. Obviously this is the web, so that's never completely possible. So I don't pretend my feeling makes a huge amount of sense.

So it depends how many people take your view (where add-verts can, I think, live alongside fees) or mine (where I don't think they can).