> Curious how this any different than uploading your photos to Facebook...
Technically it's not: app developers are using another service to handle file storage. However, the difference lies in the promise from app.net that they won't arbitrarily shut off your app because they feel like it or because it somehow competes with their own service. Facebook has introduced fear into their developer ecosystem that they can't be trusted to build a popular product on top of. App.net is saying, "you can trust us, we are an infrastructure company..." like Amazon.
> Specifically, how's that make my content portable?
I suppose it doesn't. Any file storage service has some amount of lock-in, but people can create tools to import/export data to and from different services. Unless you have all of your data stored locally on harddrives in your house, you will have to use some service and trust their level of non-evilness.
OpenPhoto offers S3, Dropbox, and local storage out of the box (which is awesome), but even if I want to switch storage providers, I'm going to incur a switching cost (mostly paid with time to export/import).
I'm only mentioning OpenPhoto for philosophical reasons as I think these two services solve entirely different problems.
We support S3, Dropbox, CX, Box.com, DreamObjects and local file system. Two of which were contributed by the community. The point being, this list isn't controlled by any single person or entitiy.
> However, the difference lies in the promise from app.net that they won't arbitrarily shut off your app because they feel like it or because it somehow competes with their own service.
Perhaps I'm in the minority that doesn't trust promises of a company with valuable data (photos, for me). If it's not valuable data then why care at all (my tweets).
> I'm going to incur a switching cost
For hosted accounts we provide a migration option. All your photos are seamlessly moved from Dropbox to S3 and all your links and mobile apps work as they always have. http://i.imgur.com/wWUc5uA.png
That being said, someone should write an App.net file system adapter for OpenPhoto :).
Technically it's not: app developers are using another service to handle file storage. However, the difference lies in the promise from app.net that they won't arbitrarily shut off your app because they feel like it or because it somehow competes with their own service. Facebook has introduced fear into their developer ecosystem that they can't be trusted to build a popular product on top of. App.net is saying, "you can trust us, we are an infrastructure company..." like Amazon.
> Specifically, how's that make my content portable?
I suppose it doesn't. Any file storage service has some amount of lock-in, but people can create tools to import/export data to and from different services. Unless you have all of your data stored locally on harddrives in your house, you will have to use some service and trust their level of non-evilness.
OpenPhoto offers S3, Dropbox, and local storage out of the box (which is awesome), but even if I want to switch storage providers, I'm going to incur a switching cost (mostly paid with time to export/import).