Stop defending your system. Either it will work out, or fizzle out like most good ideas on the internet. Writing long posts defending your product won't convince anyone here.
But honestly, save your breath. Trying to convince a bunch of programmers that your private messaging system is going to be better than email is a lost cause. Maybe end users who barely understand email might be able to get snowballed into thinking email is a dying technology, but anyone in a tech field knows it isn't. Email is the backbone of business, and private messaging is not going to be the replacement.
Get your testers, try to sell some memberships, and see how far that takes you. I read a great article about minimum viable products over the weekend that I think might sum up your project pretty well.
here's the link...
http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product
Ignore the video presentation, it's basicallly just the same text under it with slides. But here's the part that I think might apply to you...
Quote:
We thought it was a great idea for that whole two weeks. We built it out and we shipped it and we spent countless hours debating exactly what features had to be in it or not in it, and we were going to sell it for $1.99.
Our theory was, pricing won’t get in the way of anybody buying this thing. We want to make it cheap and easy and it will make lots of buzz and Wall Street Journal and New York Times are going to cover this thing; it’s going to be awesome.
I remember for us in those days, two weeks of development was a lot, because we were a pretty fast team. We did that, we shipped it — cut to the chase, nobody bought it. We sold exactly zero copies of the Kerry vs. Bush avatar.
We tried a bunch of different permutations and different variations of it and added features, and we changed the price, and eventually we gave it away for free, and even at free we couldn’t sell any copies.
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