Founder and CEO of App.net Dalton Caldwell is refocussing his product into a realtime feed API and service. Stating on the funding page that App.net is "building a better way to share your status", there are also clear digs at Twitter, in the notes about the ability to own your own data and the lack of advertising. On the second of those points, App.net stated: "We believe that advertising-supported social services are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done."
Caldwell further outlined his vision for App.net recently in a post on his blog, and he reaffirmed when speaking to .net that he strongly believes what he's doing with App.net is the direction in which Twitter should have gone – a realtime cloud API company: "The join.app.net proposal is exactly what I think Twitter could have been. When I wrote an earlier post about Twitter, a lot of people challenged me to define what the business model and company would have looked like, and join.app.net is my concrete answer."