"Too important to be ad-supported"

I just signed up, through a Kickstarter-like campaign, to support California entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell and his team in their efforts to bring a commercial Twitter-alternative to market.

Caldwell does a succinct job articulating what's wrong with committing a global public utility like Twitter to the tired, unambitious, user-hostile (my adjectives, not his, except maybe for the third one) ad-based revenue model. Make users the focus!

If you love Twitter, regard yourself at least as much as a producer or participant as a consumer, value your time and mind-share, and haven't already checked out Caldwell's posts on the proposed Twitter-alternative, go to this post on his blog.

Not claiming originality in the critique of both Twitter and Facebook expressed on this blog over the past couple years, but what Caldwell says aligns with the thoughts developed here over time and collected under the tag, Ad-Free Commercial Web.

Four things I can think of to do in the meantime:

• Re-visit identi.ca and reflect further about that experience;
• Use Dan Carleton's tool to block sponsored tweets from your desktop Twitter timeline;
• Report as spam any sponsored tweets that show up in your mobile timeline (I'm doing it; I like to think it's retarding the frequency, though I imagine Twitter may block that reporting function at some point);
• Send Twitter a Dollar, to signal that you'd be willing to pay.

Image: "The Twitter bird escaped," by Frederik Hermann / Flickr.