ADN.NET: To get beyond social app.net needs to make parting painless

I love app.net as it is now, but nothing is forever. App.net is a specialized taste, and it needs to grow to survive.

That growth might come from its current social network features (ex: my stream and its RSS feed), but it would be good to have other growth options. Current work includes competitors to messaging, chat rooms, Google Reader Shares, and file and photo sharing.

I'm hoping several of these efforts will catch on, but first people like me need to use them and talk about them. (Like me, but with more fans :-). Problem is, we're a wary bunch. We hate losing our content.

That suggests a first principal for ADN beyond-social. Painless exits.

That's hard to do for anything non-trivial. Of all my Cloud services, only my Simplenote/Notational Velocity data is truly free. If Simplenote expired tomorrow, all of my content would remain on my hard drive and I could move it readily to Dropbox for sharing. It wouldn't be as good as what I have now, but I could keep going.

Beyond Simplenote things get harder. The next tier of freedom is probably Domain transfer, static web page hosting, and perhaps Wordpress migration. After that maybe moving Contacts and Calendars, perhaps moving email (but not archives) ... 

Yeah, Data Lock is ubiquitous.

So maybe it's time to try something different.