Strange that Marco – smart as he is – should conveniently ignore the fact that Facebook, although always free, started out invitation only, worked OK for them. The world doesn’t need another Twitter, but it might benefit from a better social network, which is what ADN wants to provide.

It would be utterly insane of Dalton and the team to simply open up the network to anyone who wanted to join without experimenting in this way first and getting some idea of the conversion rate – see what it actually costs them to serve the free users and how many more paying customers they get as a result. I’d be amazed if the plan isn’t eventually to have an open access free tier but first they’ve got to make sure the service is good enough, sticky enough and converts enough paying users.