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Daring Fireball: App.net
- soapdog 14y agoWhy is app.net better than identi.ca? Honest question, I am curious
- tree_of_item 14y agoBecause it makes Dalton Caldwell money. At least, that's the reason Caldwell would give you. If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on status.net, or at least something open source.
- kposehn 14y ago> If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on status.net, or at least something open source. I disagree. When making a business, your paying customer is the one you serve. If App.net goes for charging users and developers, they'll (logically) focus on those exact people.
- AznHisoka 14y agoI disagree with your disagreement. Caldwell just wants to make money (and the glory) Nothing wrong with that. I want to make money too first and foremost :)
- kposehn 14y agoHah! I'm more disagreeing with the notion that a product can't be for users/developers if he is charging them for it. There is of course nothing wrong with making money :D
- gammarator 14y agoCompare the global feeds: https://alpha.app.net/global/ https://alpha.app.net/global/ https://identi.ca/ https://identi.ca/
- comex 14y agoidenti.ca's global feed is a little messier, but not much (it also has more functionality, and although it's a matter of taste, I like the design). They seem to be about equally active, although identi.ca has users posting in multiple languages and they seem to not have bothered to split posts by language. Neither site has ads. What am I supposed to be looking at?
- lylemckeany 14y agoIt's in English, first off. :-)
- kosso 14y agohow is identi.ca funded? I'm curious? (I'm also a backer of app.net)
- patrickaljord 14y agohttp://www.crunchbase.com/company/statusnet http://www.crunchbase.com/company/statusnet
- nava 14y agoThe power of correctly aligned incentives are Huge. http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-psychology-of-entrepreneurial-misjudgment http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-psychology-of-entrep...
- kylec 14y agoThe answer, for me, is simple: there are a good number of people I follow on Twitter that are endorsing app.net, which indicates that they likely intend to use it of it gets funded. The same can't be said for any other Twitter-like service (other than Twitter, of course).
- briandear 14y agoI don't understand why the founders "need" funding. If they have such a great business model and already have an alpha, then can't they bootstrap? If the idea is so good, then people should be just dying to sign up and give their credit card numbers. I mean, aren't people just dying to pay these guys $50?
- delackner 14y agoI don't know their real answer, but I thought of it as a psychological experiment; people are much more likely to join a social service if it already seems to have lots of users. This experiment provides a huge number of people a way to say "well, if there were actually X people on the service then sure, I'd also become a dedicated user". If they hit their goal, all those people will have paid enough that they feel emotionally attached to justifying their decision via using the service. It just might work. A service doesn't need to have EVERYONE, it just has to have enough people to be more interesting for all its participants than the alternative.
- corin_ 14y agoI think the more important note is that if they don't hit the goal, all those people won't have paid anything. Whereas without this fundraising period, the first people in are going to say "I'm the first person in, if I pay $50 there's nobody else to talk to", and... then nobody becomes the first to pay it. (Well not nobody, but few people.)
- Steko 14y agoIdenti.ca is a spammer's paradise.
- streptomycin 14y agoIdentica (StatusNet) is open source and federated. For some people, those are negatives. The "walled garden" approach is a very attractive business model.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- fromhet 14y agoSo, someone made a twitter clone?
- jayfuerstenberg 14y agoI think the idea is that competition triggers the incumbent to do better. Like how Google+'s circles finally forced Facebook to better model inter-personal relationships (at the time, only "friend" or "not friend"). Nobody knows what will result here but Twitter has been worsening of late so it's worth a shot IMHO.
- flyt 14y agoFacebook lists existed for at least two years prior to Google+. Nobody used them because nobody wants to meticulously organize their friends into buckets and categorize their communications.
- H_L 14y agoApp.net is not Twitter. It's an infrastructure, upon which new social services can bloom. It's AWS.
- briandear 14y agoWe have infrastructure. It's called AWS. The infrastructure of App.net is not revolutionary or even that interesting. Why do new social services need this infrastructure?
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoSo that doesn't make sense. If I have a website running on AWS, do I have my users pay AWS for me?
- 89a 14y agoI don't know if even the owners know what this shit is
- revelation 14y agoIs there a single piece of information in here? It reads like another pitch, and I frankly don't think HN has been lacking in the "app.net" coverage department. I think the founders should be more actively looking for funding on other channels, if they want to fill up that bar. HN seems like a saturated market.
- huggyface 14y agoThis 'startup' is one of those things on HN that really leaves me scratching my head, sure that there must be much more that I'm missing. Is this really it? And to Gruber's pitch, is it because he has a vested interest, financially? Is his "backing" that he pitches it for others to financially contribute?
- gojomo 14y agoIn context, 'backing' means Gruber has committed to one of the join.app.net supporter tiers: paying money in for expected future services.
- jopt 14y agoNoting that the money will be refunded if there aren't enough backers. This guarantees a non-trivial customer base and makes it a lower risk investment.
- 1as 14y agoOne of the nicest things about Apple products is the simplicity of the underlying business model: you get hardware (most generally, also some software and services like AppleCare) from them, and you give them money in return. I think Gruber is a fan of this approach. Apple's brand and future success then depends on you loving the product, which means they spend a lot of the money you've given them on hiring smart and dedicated people to build more loveable products. It's a virtuous cycle. But most web-era companies (like Google and Facebook) have adopted a different business model: you get their product for free, with the trade-off being that you have to look at a few ads here and there. The problem with this approach is that they end up hiring more smart and dedicated people to work on advertising techniques, sales, UI, algorithms, &c. than those who actually work on building ever more loveable product. (And they might even IPO at a high valuation, putting even more pressure on the company to deliver advertising revenue growth.) App.net is trying to get back to the virtuous cycle of people paying for nice products – that has been the standard in commerce since the beginning – so that they can concentrate on making a great, benign product as opposed to spending the future fretting about 'monetization' (think about how awkward that word really is!) or advertising. It's a trend I'd love to see more of, and I hope that everybody here gives backing a second thought. EDIT 1: Gruber obviously carries some sway, the total grew by $1850 in the last 10 minutes. EDIT 2: To continue the above, the total grew by $15000 in the last 2 hours.
- Kilimanjaro 14y agoJaiku didn't have advertisers yet it failed. I really root for app.net to succeed, also somebody please come up with a better Facebook, too much identity info managed by these two companies to feel a little unease, specially after their privacy fiascos.
- gojomo 14y agoDrawing useful lessons from Jaiku is confounded by the Google acquisition. (See also: Dodgeball.)
- sadgfasfda 14y agoDo we have a name yet for blog posts that are little more than a full page comment? Blogment? Double-twit?
- barclay 14y agoJesus. I hadn't realized it's $50 to sign up. May be awesome, but that's a high price to experiment with.
- DJSundog 14y agoIt's $50 for a year of service. One crappy Starbucks coffee a month isn't bad to be treated like a customer instead of a set of eyeballs to sell. (Yes, I'm a backer.)
- LVB 14y agoI prefer the App.net endorsement by Pinboard's founder: https://twitter.com/baconmeteor/status/223947369467744259 https://twitter.com/baconmeteor/status/223947369467744259
- mortenjorck 14y agoThis service is better-designed than Craigslist! You should sign up! This service is more privacy-sensitive than Facebook! You should sign up! This service is less dickish than Twitter! You should sign up! Sure, it's possible to unseat an entrenched juggernaut. But you don't beat a MySpace unless you're, well, a Facebook. You can't best the incumbent on one factor alone. You have to build an experience that is so radically more compelling that people will actually give up their existing network on the old product just to use yours. And that kind of product is a genuine rarity.
- jmduke 14y agoThis service costs $50/year more than Craigslist! This service costs $50/year more than Facebook! This service costs $50/year more than Twitter!
- redslazer 14y agoI'm really not sure why people are down voting you. It is absolutely true. Most people are not prepared to take out their credit card for something like this. app.net becomes valuable once it has data but it needs users for data. Most users of twitter are not developers, they get their value from the free frontend. Developers are complaining because they don't have access to the data. So they want non-developers to pay so they can have data for free. These non-developers dont really see any value in giving data to developers. app.net wants to sell a story, but it wants people to pay for it. Duckduckgo is also selling a story but for free which is why its doing so well. If DDG pitch was pay us money for a privacy concerned SE then it to would have miserably failed. (this is not a prediction that app.net will fail, I really hope it works)
- dannyr 14y agoOk. I downvoted all the posts this thread up to the parent because I feel posts like these make the HN community stink. If a startup raise a massive amount of funding with no revenue model, a lot of people here scream bubble. Now you have a startup that has a revenue model and not seeking additional funding, people still keep leaving snarky comments. There is a big difference if a company makes money from users vs advertisers. Companies focus on what gives them revenue and I'm excited to see what App.Net can create if they focus just on the users.
- adriand 14y agoI'm tempted to contribute to App.net, because it seems like a great idea and I'd like to see it succeed. However, I'm starting to think that I just may have no use for social networks of any kind at all any more. Twitter feels like work to read and "maintain" and we're always told we have to maintain it. Facebook feels like a cesspool. I've been focused on spending time each day on learning new skills (and relearning old ones) and I'm enjoying it far more than I ever enjoyed social networking, and I'm actually getting something out of it. When I want to read something, I either come to HN or I read a book (a good book is worth at least 10,000 tweets or 1,000 blog posts, so what is really the point of all those endless tweets?) I sometimes try to imagine the people I truly respect (the authors and inventors and scientists) spending all kinds of time on Twitter and Facebook and I keep failing.
- drumdance 14y agoAmen. I drastically cut back my use of Twitter and Facebook several months ago and have not missed them at all.
- chucknelson 14y agoSame experience here - cut way back on my Twitter use. I see Twitter as mostly for celebrities and community leaders (tech community or whatever) to entertain us, provide interesting insight, or spread important news. Overall, though, it all isn't very important in our lives and it's not worth it to monitor all day every day. Take people like Gruber, though, who now integrate this type of social service into their work - it is now really important to them. And of course they will communicate to us that "hey, this is really important!". I'd say for most of us ("the general public"), it's just not that important.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoI agree (mostly). Social networks can provide value. But the cost of using them might be too high. Earlier this year I took one month off twitter completely. Before that I was scared to miss a tweet. I would wake up a read through what I missed while I was asleep. But after a few days of not using it I didn't feel I needed it. I may have been a few hours late hearing about the latest 'big' tech story but that was all. After one month I went back to using it but a few days ago I decided to shut it off again. Even if you follow interesting people, and you want to hear their ideas, you still have to wade through a lot of crap. For example, one thing a lot of people post if baby photos. Why post photos of your child to a public service where you are being followed mostly by strangers? So, even if you are careful who you follow there are still noise control issues. I could image Facebook being the same for me if I wasn't so careful about who I friend. Recently I tried their subscriber feature and subscribed to tech bloggers, news pages etc. After a few days I felt like never using Facebook again. After removing those subscriptions are bringing it down to just my close friends again it was fine. Largely because Facebook's noise controls are better. They auto created lists for me (School friends, close friends, acquaintances) and made it easy to say what type of updates I wanted from each person. Regarding app.net I don't think it will succeed. But even if it does get off the ground and get a decent number of users I don't see the need for another social network. It seems like the reason for it to exist is the API and the fact they promise not to screw over developers. But developers aren't going to build apps and use the API if there are only a few thousand people on the network. They will go where the people (and money) are - Twitter and Facebook.
- DigitalSea 14y agoA better Twitter? I've never heard those kind of sentences being thrown around before. Shut up and take my money... In all seriousness though, you can build something better than Twitter but it's the Google problem all over again: the market is cornered and unless you've got big pockets like Facebook or Apple, you've got no chance of going toe-to-toe with the big guys like Twitter.
- Argorak 14y agoMaybe a crowd-funding drive upfront is actually a good action in that case. If it succeeds, you have roughly ~50000 seed users that have a vested interest in seeing your product succeed.
- thedeuce 14y agomore crap, 'nother day.
- RexRollman 14y agoThe problem I have with all these sites is that they are run by for-profit companies, which (for me) makes them untrustworthy. I would love to see a social networking site run by a democratic non-profit organization dedicated to freedom.
- hkmurakami 14y agoHmm... a social network run by Mozilla perhaps?
- RexRollman 14y agoThat would be awesome.
- jmathai 14y agoI'm working on OpenPhoto which is part of Mozilla's WebFWD program. It's as close as we've got considering the social components are not yet finished. https://webfwd.org/portfolio/#Open%20Photo https://webfwd.org/portfolio/#Open%20Photo
- hkmurakami 14y agoThis is pretty cool, I'll definitely keep this in mind if/when I finally get a smartphone and start using a photosharing app. Thanks!
- comex 14y agolike identi.ca?
- xentronium 14y agoLike... diaspora?
- RexRollman 14y agoDiaspora's distributed nature makes it a non-starter for me.
- zenocon 14y agoBuilding a Twitter clone with Twitter Bootstrap - oh the irony
- nell 14y agoAs much as I want app.net to launch .. I don't think the campaign will reach its goal.
- iradik 14y agoI seem to have a flashback just now when github's battle cry was that they didn't accept VC money.
- cstrat 14y agoI signed up after reading this post!
- bobbles 14y agoNow a (member) backer for this project. I think there is definitely a market for this style of approach. (ie. charge for quality instead of ad-supported.) Good luck guys
- Reebz 14y agoWith such a lofty goal I do not understand why they capped at $1000 donations. Missing out on the big fish.
- briandear 14y agoCan you convince some mom at the gym to pay $50 to use App.net? If the answer is no, then that's a big problem in building a sustainable social business. Most people don't see a "problem" with Twitter. I occasionally have seen a sponsored tweet, but it's even less obtrusive than google and EVERYBODY uses google. Convincing the soccer mom set to ditch facebook and twitter over some nebulous concept of a developer-friendly social thingy.. not going to happen. To me it seems like the App.net gents are playing this power to the people angle just as a hook to justify funding for a twitter clone. I can make a twitter clone (and an API to go with it) in less than a weekend. If I wanted it to be beautiful, my buddy and I could spend a month of evenings working on it and it would cost us no more than the price of the beers. I am starting to think that this entire thing is a scam. A publicity stunt to convince people to pay $50 for something that could be built by following the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial and the Service Oriented Design with Ruby book. This whole project is too much "inside baseball" the user on the street doesn't care, doesn't want to care because it really doesn't solve any problem for them. A pay-per-tweet platform? C'mon, who actually thinks that has business potential? Especially if just a few people are using it. None of my friends are on it. So what value is the "social" component to me? I don't know a single person on App.net, so why the heck would I spend my development time building some "robust" app atop of a platform that no one is using? You get 10 million users and then I'll potentially care about the API.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dannyr 14y agoPeople pay for Angie's List ($46 a year). If the early members of App.net built a great community and become a good resource, regular people would pay for it.
- endersshadow 14y agoPeople get immediate value out of Angie's List: Vetted services. Angie's List has an actual story--everybody's had a terrible experience with a plumber, electrician, or other service. Not everybody has had a terrible experience getting data out of Twitter. Most people really don't care about that. I think there's a vast, vast difference between the two.
- capex 14y agoThe 11px font on daringfireball.net seems like a notice board to the user. Get ready to squint, zoom in, or go away. I am not budging.
- ricardobeat 14y agoApparently heello.com is also attempting a comeback, no dollars required: http://new.heello.com/ http://new.heello.com/ Their interface was nice. They want to build a third-party friendly ecosystem but still base it on ads, I wonder how...
- Argorak 14y agoI am not sure whether this funding drive is actually meant to succeed. Let me search my tinfoil hat before continuing... When talking with VCs, mass-market and transaction-based is always a tough sell. So why not try a funding drive that might not succeed, but show a good amount of interest? You get 2 things out of it: a) Contacts of people actually wanting to buy your product and are vocal about it. b) Proof that there is interested in your concept. Especially in the social network space, where fees are something rather unheard of, you won't be able to sell "like Twitter, but with payed accounts" very well. Then again, I regularly meet people that would like to pay for their Twitter account for certain benefits (like being able to verify their account instead of hoping that Twitter deems their request worthy). So this funding drive looks like a proof-of-concept to me much more than a success or die action.
- imaginator 14y agoAnyone remember “Go to AOL Keyword: Coke”? I try to avoid blowing the buddycloud trumpet (we're building an open federated/distributed social network) on hn each time there is a future-of-twitter post. Sorry - I can't hold back this time. Here's my context for reading this app.net post: Twitter works in the same way the old AOL client did: you accessed some message boards and stock prices and film websites using AOL keywords. Marketers flocked to AOL to put up the latest movie premier website. At the same time there was the small techno-elite downloading Mosaic 0.98 over their SLIP connection and starting to experiment with the "world wide web". In comparison with the closed systems like Compuserve and AOL, the open web took much longer to evolve becasue everybody was working on different parts without any central coordination. It was this lack of central coordination that brougt us a more robust system and I don't think that any of us will argue for a world where AOL is the gold standard of finding, hosting and accessing content. Twitter is pushing hard to be the gold standard of messaging in the same way that AOL did. And are marketers flocking to work with Twitter along with newscasters giving out hashtags and @twitter-names. But, in the backrooms and basements and hackerspaces of the internet, today's equivalent of Mosaic downloaders are experimenting with open, distributed social networks like buddycloud. The buddycloud team and everyone who attends our hackathons that are working to build the post-Twitter future just like Netscape helped launch the open web. The future will not be build around one company, but a couple of companies like buddycloud can help nudge it forward. The future will be protocol based rather than homesteading on another company's API for fear of API key revocation. So to app.net, I see them fitting into the twitter ecosystem like a paid email provider that doesn't let you send email outside of their domain: You are still tied to one company. Still tied into hoping your API key doesn't get revoked. To move away from Twitter, we must think bigger: a giant network like email where everyone can run their own servers and they all interconnect. We're trying to solve some of these problems with buddycloud. And props to the buddycloud team, I think they are doing a great job. I'll go back to biting my toungue on each new future-of-twitter post.
- xam 14y agoWhat did you think about diaspora?
- 14y ago
- gubatron 14y agoThere's just one thing that's odd here. How do you avoid Marketers disguised as developers? You will still get the ads no matter what one way or another.
- xam 14y agoI think they will just kick out any advertisers they discover.
- fredleblanc 14y agoFull disclosure: I backed the project. I think it's fine if marketers use the service. It's similar to Twitter in that you can choose who you follow. The difference is that if I want Coke in my timeline, I have to follow Coke (or someone cleverly disguised as not Coke) in my follow list. If companies add their brand to app.net, fine. If people opt-in to follow those brands, also fine. No harm to everyone else.
- gubatron 14y agoWhat really needs to happen here is that there needs to be a truly free social stream service for the internet, owned by none and by all. Only then you will have total developer freedom, and no censorhip possible. If you've also been thinking about this for the last 2 weeks, drop a line. Think of IRC evolved (message horizon based on #tags not rooms, just like Twitter), syndicated, P2P Server Network, served over HTTP to the end user so that it has all of what Twitter has to offer (maybe a few more characters) would love to think together with people who like tough challenges about a new HTTP on top of P2P architecture to solve this and other problems to leave a new arm of the internet for our kids.
- 89a 14y agoThis whole thing is a bit of a joke. I especially find it hilarious that they're calling it app.net only because they spent probably a decent sum of money on a 3 letter domain for their (failing?) marketing tools. App.net as a name makes absolutely no sense (and not like other senseless names like Wii or whatever, but as in it already means something else) and quite frankly I'm shocked that people like Gruber and Marco are on board with this ridiculous bound to fail idea. Also why on earth they adopted the Kickstarter model instead of the Pinboard.in model is beyond me. Can only imagine they got a lust for instant #swag
- anu_gupta 14y ago> Also why on earth they adopted the Kickstarter model instead of the Pinboard.in model is beyond me. I would derive value from pinboard if I was the only subscriber. The same cannot be said for a social network like app.net. I joined Twitter in September 2006, but I didn't start really using it until December 2006 when some friends and colleagues signed up.
- xam 14y agoSeems more like an elitest social network than anything. That might not be such a terrible thing- after all, Facebook started out only allowing people with .edu email addresses. Metafilter now charges a one-time fee of $5. I'll be interested to see what happens with App.net.