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I think it's going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyo

by maxwin 14y ago

I think it's going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyone else, a social network with ads (that are not TOO annoying) is much better than one that ask for your money. He might be able to find enough people to pay to become a profitable business but I doubt he will ever reach facebook or twitter like scale. And if it doesn't scale, the paying members will leave eventually.

quartus 14y ago
One thing to note is that our funding velocity is not linear, it has been picking up speed. If we can keep the momentum going and spread the word, we are confident that we will hit our goal. Regarding ads being not too annoying, people are backing app.net because of the larger goal: creating a service where the user is the customer rather than the product. This allows app.net to focus all of its resources on pleasing the user, and ensures app.net will not try to shut down 3rd party developers who are competing for advertising dollars. To this end, app.net does not need to become twitter-like scale to create a sustainable business.
- webjprgm 14y ago
  Would it work if the 3rd-party devs were the customers? I.e. anyone using XYZ's app gets in for free because XYZ company pays the usage fees (out of it's ad revenue). That would avoid app.net trying to shut down services that customers like. It would also improve user adoption since it's free to the user. But how does this model compare to the customer-centric one?
  - wmf 14y ago
    Another model that might be worth trying is pay to send, free to receive. So if people just want to follow Scoble, let Scoble pay for 'em.
    - ConstantineXVI 14y ago
      Are you suggesting users pay per follower? You've essentially turned it into an advertising platform; which gets us right back where we started only worse (can't get influence at all unless you pay for it)
      - wmf 14y ago
        I think there are crucial differences between Twitter's "tweets + ads" model and the "tweets are ads" model I'm suggesting, but this probably isn't the place to discuss it.
    - gojomo 14y ago
      GoTo.Tweet? OverTuritter?
andrew_simone 14y ago
Depends on what you mean by "pull this off." The alpha itself is pretty beefy for the alpha's I've seen. The API isn't stable but it's certainly nothing to sniff at and the web GUI is more realized in a few weeks than twitter was in a few months (learning from others mistakes makes this easier, of course). Dalton's pretty clear said he's "not trying to kill twitter" see, http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Will-app-net-kill-Twitter/answer/Dalton-Caldwell http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Will-app-net-kill-Twitter/ans...
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
I agree with your analysis, but it's worth noting that size/scale aren't everything. Hacker News isn't the size of Reddit (or Digg at its height) and I'm kind of glad about that. If App.Net ends up being the 'Hacker News Twitterlike' service, is that a success or failure?
- scott_w 14y ago
  The difference is that Hacker News doesn't need to turn a profit. app.net has a number of running costs that need to be serviced and, to do that, people have to want to pay. There is a minimum threshold that is required to keep users with the service, otherwise it feels empty. Examples are Google Wave vs Google+. The former felt empty and pointless, while the latter can be interesting because of the number of users, albeit they may not be people you know.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    It's not a good example though, because no one knew what the hell to use Wave for anyway. It was just a conglomeration of product features that had no clear place to fit into existing workflows. Twitter on the other hand fits in everywhere. People just love to crap out little 160 character nuggets in between everything else they do all day long.
    - scott_w 14y ago
      Is it such a bad example? I'm not sure what app.net is. A "real-time social feed" that I pay for? As a developer (his primary audience), what does this do for me over Twitter or Facebook?
      - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        Won't get kicked off.
sdqali 14y ago
"And if it doesn't scale, the paying members will leave eventually." Could you explain why you think so? I would think that the fact that it is a paid service will reduce the amount of noise in the system and a lot of people would value a social network with less noise.
- gfodor 14y ago
  what exactly constitutes 'noise' in a social network? if you're talking about the issue of having lots of stuff in your feed from people who you are not interested in, there is an easy solution: unfollow or unsubscribe from them! if your concern is more about having specific posts surfaced from people, but not all of them ("I'm interested in Bob's tech posts, but not his cat posts") then this has nothing to do with paid vs free and is a filtering/algorithm problem.
Irishsteve 14y ago
API Access , 400 daily active users and its gonna be a funtastic service for eejits* who like machine learning, personalization etc. * Me.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
rfouquet 14y ago
I disagree. It's not about the ads directly really. It's about the fact that the ads will dictate the fate of the service. To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. Just look at Twitter: in order to monetize, they will eventually block third party apps from using the service, which is bad for the users, because Twitter's own apps can't compete with many top third party apps. Looking at the users that are currently using the alpha version you can see that these are mostly tech people - developers, designers, bloggers, artists etc - who are enjoying even the current state, which just has a few hundred users. We don't really mind if the service doesn't scale as Twitter does, that might actually be a good thing. And there are services that proof that paid accounts are a valid and successful way to monetize: look at pinboard.in, for example.
- badclient 14y ago
  To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. That is not entirely accurate either. In order to have any customers, even by your definition, twitter must continue to have lots of users. So there is already a checks and balance system of sorts in place such that if twitter goes too far in the direction of addressing advertisers while hurting the users, the users may jump ship causing the advertisers to do the same as well.
  - rfouquet 14y ago
    The vast majority of Twitter users today use the web interface or Twitter's own apps. These are ordinary people, not tech geeks. They don't care about APIs - they don't even know what that is. Twitter doesn't hurt them by restricting their service to their own apps. It's pretty unlikely that these people will ever want to pay $50 a year for a micro messaging service like app.net or care enough about not being a product, so they will never be the focus of app.net. Twitter enjoys a tremendous popularity because of all those celebrities using the service. I mean celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, not like John Gruber. And that keeps the masses coming to Twitter. It does turn away the tech folks though, the people who used Twitter in its very beginning and which are now turned away by its politics.
FredBrach 14y ago
Here is an alternative I humbly suggest (in case you missed it): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354148 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354148
ghshephard 14y ago
I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people . Four of those six people have already voiced support for join.app.net ((Dan Benjamin, John Grueber, Marco Armenti, John Siracusa). I expect the other two would join fairly quickly, and, given the "open" nature of join.app.net, I expect anybody who wanted cross-posting from twitter over to join.app.net, wouldn't have much difficulty. Just have the client post on both locations (much like Path posts to both Path and Facebook) I really only want about a dozen people on Join.App.Net, and most of them are already there. So, for _me_ it just has to scale to twelve people - it just needs to be the right twelve people - and so far it looks good.
- lamebrain 14y ago
  > living in a bubble > I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people
- jmduke 14y ago
  Honest question: what stops you from simply browsing a twitter list of those twelve people? Or, more pragmatically: what incentive do I, a person who doesn't really care about 'openness' and uses Twitter for a billion other reasons anyway, have to pay $50 and subscribe to app.net instead of just following the twitter list of those twelve people?
  - shyn3 14y ago
    If you can't figure it out yet.. you are not the target market.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Twitter is fine now, but, over the next few years, will become increasingly polluted, and brought down by the mandates of Twitter Inc. having to be a multi-billion dollar company, and make money off eyeballs. Twitter is _fine_ right now - I can chose my client, I can follow a clean feed - (all of the above are in my feed). There are NO problems whatsoever with twitter, for me, right now. In the next few years, that will likely change. Clients will become restricted, the feed will become polluted, and my eyeballs will be resold. I like to get ahead of the curve. I use Path, not Facebook. I don't watch commercial TV w/commercials. And I support app.net. Their business model is pretty straightforward - "The user is the customer, not the advertiser." I like being the customer. That's why I'm paying $50. It's also why I'll migrate off Path to the first company that comes up with a business model that also foregoes selling my information and attention (While, like twitter, it's pretty close to perfect for me right now, I'm sure Path will go downhill - unless they find some ueber clever low-overhead approach akin to what Craigslist has been able to do.)
EwanToo 14y ago
I think the real bubble is people ignoring the existence of status.net and identi.ca, and the reasons why they never took off as alternatives to twitter. Status.net has evolved into a private twitter for companies but the identica service still runs, still has a user base, and is everything you need for an alternative to twitter.
- rdl 14y ago
  Random Canadian company vs. a well-connected Silicon Valley founder would potentially be sufficient. Or 2012 vs. 2009.
  - huggyface 14y ago
    Random Canadian company vs. a well-connected Silicon Valley founder would potentially be sufficient. You mean as a reason to choose the former, right?
benwerd 14y ago
For me, I don't care if it's a bubble. I'm not going to stop using Twitter any time soon, I don't think - but I'd love to have another network that's full of the people who will self-select to join this. Ultimately I think they'll end up driving usage for a lot of other people, too, and I'll bet that's his strategy, at least in part.
guiambros 14y ago
You're missing the point. He doesn't have to create a closed platform for paying members only. He just need to have enough paying members to maintain the platform. Wikipedia is free and has no ads, but survives thanks to its "paid members" (i.e., donors). Still open and free of ads for everybody (well, except for that one month that you see Jimmy Wales' banners all the time :)). Yes, somebody has to pay the bills on app.net. Maybe it'll be 10,000 core hackernews users. If it gets traction, maybe he'll find enough corporate supporters and donors to keep it afloat. Maybe he'll be able to create an ecosystem where devs pay to get premium services, or some revenue sharing model (like Apple/Android). There's tons of options to make money without having to sell its user base like twitter/fb. That's the approach he's taking. It's not an easy challenge, but kudos to Dalton for trying. I'm a backer, and a strong supporter of the initiative. Not because I'm against ads (quite the opposite; I work at a marketing agency), but there's a clear conflict of interest between companies whose product is to sell their user base - fb, twitter - versus those that focus on users - wikipedia, dropbox, etc.
wamatt 14y ago
I agree it's a tough sell, but it does looks like he will reach the funding target on Kickstarter.

by maxwin 14y ago

quartus 14y ago

One thing to note is that our funding velocity is not linear, it has been picking up speed. If we can keep the momentum going and spread the word, we are confident that we will hit our goal. Regarding ads being not too annoying, people are backing app.net because of the larger goal: creating a service where the user is the customer rather than the product. This allows app.net to focus all of its resources on pleasing the user, and ensures app.net will not try to shut down 3rd party developers who are competing for advertising dollars. To this end, app.net does not need to become twitter-like scale to create a sustainable business.

webjprgm 14y ago
Would it work if the 3rd-party devs were the customers? I.e. anyone using XYZ's app gets in for free because XYZ company pays the usage fees (out of it's ad revenue). That would avoid app.net trying to shut down services that customers like. It would also improve user adoption since it's free to the user. But how does this model compare to the customer-centric one?
- wmf 14y ago
  Another model that might be worth trying is pay to send, free to receive. So if people just want to follow Scoble, let Scoble pay for 'em.
  - ConstantineXVI 14y ago
    Are you suggesting users pay per follower? You've essentially turned it into an advertising platform; which gets us right back where we started only worse (can't get influence at all unless you pay for it)
    - wmf 14y ago
      I think there are crucial differences between Twitter's "tweets + ads" model and the "tweets are ads" model I'm suggesting, but this probably isn't the place to discuss it.
  - gojomo 14y ago
    GoTo.Tweet? OverTuritter?

andrew_simone 14y ago

Depends on what you mean by "pull this off." The alpha itself is pretty beefy for the alpha's I've seen. The API isn't stable but it's certainly nothing to sniff at and the web GUI is more realized in a few weeks than twitter was in a few months (learning from others mistakes makes this easier, of course). Dalton's pretty clear said he's "not trying to kill twitter" see, http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Will-app-net-kill-Twitter/answer/Dalton-Caldwell http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Will-app-net-kill-Twitter/ans...

michaelbuckbee 14y ago

I agree with your analysis, but it's worth noting that size/scale aren't everything. Hacker News isn't the size of Reddit (or Digg at its height) and I'm kind of glad about that. If App.Net ends up being the 'Hacker News Twitterlike' service, is that a success or failure?

scott_w 14y ago
The difference is that Hacker News doesn't need to turn a profit. app.net has a number of running costs that need to be serviced and, to do that, people have to want to pay. There is a minimum threshold that is required to keep users with the service, otherwise it feels empty. Examples are Google Wave vs Google+. The former felt empty and pointless, while the latter can be interesting because of the number of users, albeit they may not be people you know.
- dasil003 14y ago
  It's not a good example though, because no one knew what the hell to use Wave for anyway. It was just a conglomeration of product features that had no clear place to fit into existing workflows. Twitter on the other hand fits in everywhere. People just love to crap out little 160 character nuggets in between everything else they do all day long.
  - scott_w 14y ago
    Is it such a bad example? I'm not sure what app.net is. A "real-time social feed" that I pay for? As a developer (his primary audience), what does this do for me over Twitter or Facebook?
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      Won't get kicked off.

sdqali 14y ago

"And if it doesn't scale, the paying members will leave eventually." Could you explain why you think so? I would think that the fact that it is a paid service will reduce the amount of noise in the system and a lot of people would value a social network with less noise.

gfodor 14y ago
what exactly constitutes 'noise' in a social network? if you're talking about the issue of having lots of stuff in your feed from people who you are not interested in, there is an easy solution: unfollow or unsubscribe from them! if your concern is more about having specific posts surfaced from people, but not all of them ("I'm interested in Bob's tech posts, but not his cat posts") then this has nothing to do with paid vs free and is a filtering/algorithm problem.

Irishsteve 14y ago

API Access , 400 daily active users and its gonna be a funtastic service for eejits* who like machine learning, personalization etc. * Me.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

rfouquet 14y ago

I disagree. It's not about the ads directly really. It's about the fact that the ads will dictate the fate of the service. To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. Just look at Twitter: in order to monetize, they will eventually block third party apps from using the service, which is bad for the users, because Twitter's own apps can't compete with many top third party apps. Looking at the users that are currently using the alpha version you can see that these are mostly tech people - developers, designers, bloggers, artists etc - who are enjoying even the current state, which just has a few hundred users. We don't really mind if the service doesn't scale as Twitter does, that might actually be a good thing. And there are services that proof that paid accounts are a valid and successful way to monetize: look at pinboard.in, for example.

badclient 14y ago
To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. That is not entirely accurate either. In order to have any customers, even by your definition, twitter must continue to have lots of users. So there is already a checks and balance system of sorts in place such that if twitter goes too far in the direction of addressing advertisers while hurting the users, the users may jump ship causing the advertisers to do the same as well.
- rfouquet 14y ago
  The vast majority of Twitter users today use the web interface or Twitter's own apps. These are ordinary people, not tech geeks. They don't care about APIs - they don't even know what that is. Twitter doesn't hurt them by restricting their service to their own apps. It's pretty unlikely that these people will ever want to pay $50 a year for a micro messaging service like app.net or care enough about not being a product, so they will never be the focus of app.net. Twitter enjoys a tremendous popularity because of all those celebrities using the service. I mean celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, not like John Gruber. And that keeps the masses coming to Twitter. It does turn away the tech folks though, the people who used Twitter in its very beginning and which are now turned away by its politics.

FredBrach 14y ago

Here is an alternative I humbly suggest (in case you missed it): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354148 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354148

ghshephard 14y ago

I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people . Four of those six people have already voiced support for join.app.net ((Dan Benjamin, John Grueber, Marco Armenti, John Siracusa). I expect the other two would join fairly quickly, and, given the "open" nature of join.app.net, I expect anybody who wanted cross-posting from twitter over to join.app.net, wouldn't have much difficulty. Just have the client post on both locations (much like Path posts to both Path and Facebook) I really only want about a dozen people on Join.App.Net, and most of them are already there. So, for _me_ it just has to scale to twelve people - it just needs to be the right twelve people - and so far it looks good.

lamebrain 14y ago
> living in a bubble > I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people
jmduke 14y ago
Honest question: what stops you from simply browsing a twitter list of those twelve people? Or, more pragmatically: what incentive do I, a person who doesn't really care about 'openness' and uses Twitter for a billion other reasons anyway, have to pay $50 and subscribe to app.net instead of just following the twitter list of those twelve people?
- shyn3 14y ago
  If you can't figure it out yet.. you are not the target market.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Twitter is fine now, but, over the next few years, will become increasingly polluted, and brought down by the mandates of Twitter Inc. having to be a multi-billion dollar company, and make money off eyeballs. Twitter is _fine_ right now - I can chose my client, I can follow a clean feed - (all of the above are in my feed). There are NO problems whatsoever with twitter, for me, right now. In the next few years, that will likely change. Clients will become restricted, the feed will become polluted, and my eyeballs will be resold. I like to get ahead of the curve. I use Path, not Facebook. I don't watch commercial TV w/commercials. And I support app.net. Their business model is pretty straightforward - "The user is the customer, not the advertiser." I like being the customer. That's why I'm paying $50. It's also why I'll migrate off Path to the first company that comes up with a business model that also foregoes selling my information and attention (While, like twitter, it's pretty close to perfect for me right now, I'm sure Path will go downhill - unless they find some ueber clever low-overhead approach akin to what Craigslist has been able to do.)

EwanToo 14y ago

I think the real bubble is people ignoring the existence of status.net and identi.ca, and the reasons why they never took off as alternatives to twitter. Status.net has evolved into a private twitter for companies but the identica service still runs, still has a user base, and is everything you need for an alternative to twitter.

rdl 14y ago
Random Canadian company vs. a well-connected Silicon Valley founder would potentially be sufficient. Or 2012 vs. 2009.
- huggyface 14y ago
  Random Canadian company vs. a well-connected Silicon Valley founder would potentially be sufficient. You mean as a reason to choose the former, right?

benwerd 14y ago

For me, I don't care if it's a bubble. I'm not going to stop using Twitter any time soon, I don't think - but I'd love to have another network that's full of the people who will self-select to join this. Ultimately I think they'll end up driving usage for a lot of other people, too, and I'll bet that's his strategy, at least in part.

guiambros 14y ago

You're missing the point. He doesn't have to create a closed platform for paying members only. He just need to have enough paying members to maintain the platform. Wikipedia is free and has no ads, but survives thanks to its "paid members" (i.e., donors). Still open and free of ads for everybody (well, except for that one month that you see Jimmy Wales' banners all the time :)). Yes, somebody has to pay the bills on app.net. Maybe it'll be 10,000 core hackernews users. If it gets traction, maybe he'll find enough corporate supporters and donors to keep it afloat. Maybe he'll be able to create an ecosystem where devs pay to get premium services, or some revenue sharing model (like Apple/Android). There's tons of options to make money without having to sell its user base like twitter/fb. That's the approach he's taking. It's not an easy challenge, but kudos to Dalton for trying. I'm a backer, and a strong supporter of the initiative. Not because I'm against ads (quite the opposite; I work at a marketing agency), but there's a clear conflict of interest between companies whose product is to sell their user base - fb, twitter - versus those that focus on users - wikipedia, dropbox, etc.

wamatt 14y ago

I agree it's a tough sell, but it does looks like he will reach the funding target on Kickstarter.