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The ad-free bit is no big deal, but their alternative source of revenue (letting people buy popularity) seems diabolically clever.

Diabolially clever? At the moment companies pay to advertise on Facebook et al. With Badoo companies and customers pay for their bands/artists/self to reach the top of a list? This is just a slight alternation of the extant model not an alternative.

Although, yes, as Badoo gives users the ability to do what companies have done for years is new, but it's still advertising, something they claim they've abandoned.

It worked for PlentyOfFish.

12.5m users is pretty impressive considering what they're up against.

Facebook is vulnerable. The obvious way to hijack is to pull a Facebook on Facebook itself -- ask for your FB password and then copy out all your information, and msg all your friends.

If you could click a button and do a horizontal transfer to an equivalent service any time some other service crossed the line of what's acceptable to you, people would migrate in droves. Big companies survive because of inertia -- the truly disruptive technology that the Net should enable is to remove it.

Facebook's evil ways will doom it.