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Dalton Caldwell: We Did It
- jenius 14y agoI would like to publicly admit my total wrongness and congratulate Dalton on his success with this project. You have won my backing and I'll be there 'apping' with the rest of you guys. This was the somewhat popular but incorrect comment I made previously: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4278378 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4278378 Much love. Props.
- walkon 14y ago> I'll be there 'apping' Let's hope this doesn't become a verb. Tweeting is bad enough, but "apping"?
- jenius 14y agohaha was totally tounge in cheek, but seriously i wonder what the verb will be? if it does well there will have to be one eventually...
- rdl 14y agoposting
- jyap 14y agoIt will be called "tweeting on app.net".
- walkon 14y agoTwapping?
- shawndumas 14y agoposting... they are calling it posting
- dangrossman 14y agoDid Svbtle change its font recently? The text looks terrible. It's blurry, poorly aliased and some of the letters have full-out gaps in the strokes. When viewed in Windows, of course.
- evmar 14y agoMany web fonts seem to look bad on Windows, I think in part due to many websites being designed on Macs. This one looks particularly bad on Chrome, but Firefox isn't so bad.
- repsilat 14y agoIs this an argument for users disabling web fonts? I don't think there are very many situations in which they provide a better user experience. A few days ago we got the "Wikipedia Redefined" article[1] (in which the capital "I" looked like a capital "J"[2]). I don't think we have to go whole hog and completely ignore designers' intent, but if usability is being compromised I think it makes sense to take advantage of the fact that we're doing the rendering on the client. 1: http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/ http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/ 2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354000 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354000
- dwynings 14y agoYes, it used to be Proxima Nova served with Typekit.
- guscost 14y agoCongratulations!! Incredibly excited, still waiting for that killer app. EDIT: I purchased it weeks ago, but you get the idea...
- therealarmen 14y agoCongratulations to Dalton and the entire team at App.net! They deserve every penny. Dalton's steely resolve through this entire process has been an inspiration to me; it takes a lot of guts to go out on a limb and ignore all the haters. Even if App.net as a platform doesn't take off I still consider this project a success.
- zerostar07 14y agoNaive question, but how do we know they deserve every penny?
- rorrr 14y agoI watched the video, and I still don't know what app.net is. "Social platform" is all I got, that's extremely vague.
- citricsquid 14y agoTwitter, that you pay for, that has no adverts and that is developer friendly with the API. I think that's a good summary: https://alpha.app.net/ https://alpha.app.net/
- sudaily 14y agoWhy would people pay to tell other people what they ate for lunch?
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago"Why would people pay to tell other people what they ate for lunch?" Twitter and Facebook were fun when not everyone and their parents were on there. I'm hoping that the price tag keeps a lot of the people out who don't have anything of value to share. So far, from what I've seen on the alpha site, the conversations are way more interesting to me than most banter on Twitter. The higher limit of 256 characters helps too. I look forward to using App.net, whereas I find the Twitter experience increasingly frustrating.
- sudaily 14y agoYou must have some important stuff to say that you pay to say it.
- cheald 14y agoThe quality of content in a community is always higher when the community is smaller. Twitter conversations in the early days were all high-quality, too. Social networks live and die by whether your friends are on them, though, and while I get the appeal of "keeping out the riff-raff", I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that you can reach critical mass (without which your product will fail) by charging for a product that people are used to getting for free. If the team can reach critical mass, then awesome. But I think that it's going to be nearly impossible to sell to anyone but the subset of the early-adopter crowd who have a bone to pick with Facebook and Twitter, which is a very passionate, but very limited audience.
- bslatkin 14y agoBets on how soon someone will imitate this approach to the platform business in other areas?
- RandallBrown 14y agoI'm glad they're going to have someone verify it. It seemed really strange to me that they rolled their own crowd funding platform for one use. Why didn't they go with a third party like Kickstarter in the first place?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- therealarmen 14y agoAgainst Kickstarters TOS. They only allow "creative projects."
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI don't think they ever asked KS. A variety of similar projects have been presented and funded there.
- fredoliveira 14y agoWait, and your reasoning is that Kickstarter should just "open this one exception"? That'd be like opening a can of worms instead.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoMy reasoning is that it wouldn't be an exception based on past projects they approved. I think it would have been approved if it had been submitted, very likely through the normal approval process.
- ralfd 14y agoThere is a FAQ on the site. It says: > Why aren't you using Kickstarter? > We wish we could, we <3 Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter Terms Of Service explicitly prohibits raising money for this kind of service.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- briandear 14y ago>>There has been zero manipulation of numbers, or “stuffing of the ballot box” by App.net. Why would he even suggest that? I wouldn't have expected such behavior.
- jmonegro 14y agoSome people suggested this would happen, see: https://twitter.com/aaronsw/status/234628499690885120 https://twitter.com/aaronsw/status/234628499690885120
- smackfu 14y agoIf you get full funding if you hit the goal number, and zero funding if you don't, then there is usually a point where it makes sense for the project itself to contribute enough money to meet the goal. Spend $10k to get $500k for instance. With Kickstarter, there is a third party that can monitor for that, where if you roll your own Kickstarter, no one will know.
- julian37 14y agoCongratulations from me, too! A very impressive result in such a short timeframe. In danger of asking a silly question, I do wonder about this bit though: In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner. I might not be seeing the forest for the trees here, but how would anybody actually go about doing that? If you don't release identifying information (which I assume would include names, credit card numbers, and so on) how would anybody be able to verify? I'm not, in the slightest, implying there was any wrongdoing, I have no reason to believe that App.net is inflating any numbers or isn't "operated in an honest manner". I'm just genuinely curious to know how it would be possible to independently vet that all transactions were legit (or whatever it is you're trying to prove). Am I correct to assume that the best anybody could do would be to say that "the numbers looks right"? Or maybe something like "the amount of money transferred via Stripe to App.net is in the right ballpark"? If people can do better, how so? Again, genuine question.
- guelo 14y agoWhat I wonder is, why would anyone care?
- darkandbrooding 14y agoWhat follows is a layman just "thinking out loud." (But isn't that what Sunday afternoons are for?) When I use the term "auditor" I'm implying "employees at a firm" rather than "a single individual." What App.net desires is for a trusted third party to say, "Yep, they're legit." So first, you would select an auditor who has a good reputation financially, technically, and ethically. Presumably, you'd line up a couple of secondary sources to publicly reinforce the auditor's reputation and bless the auditor's methodology. It's been literally decades since I took any accounting classes, but I think you would need to follow the entire chain of some transactions, and this would necessitate showing real investor/customer data at some point. If you can secure that investor's/customer's permission, then sharing the data becomes a non-issue. How you get that permission becomes the issue. If your auditor's reputation is strong enough, their name alone may be sufficient to secure permission. But you can also take steps to create a "security narrative" designed to put the investor/customer at ease. You'd need to give the auditor access to your data, while preventing the possibility that they could leak this data. So the auditor would work in your offices, on your machines. You'd provide laptops so that you can disable all peripheral ports. You'd secure the laptops to the table. The machines would have no optical drives. Those machines would net boot, have wired LAN access but not WAN, and no wireless access at all. They would run the software the auditors required but nothing else. You'd confiscate phones and cameras from the auditors before they entered your audit environment. You could go a little crazy and record video of the auditors at work, with cameras angled so that you can see what notes the auditors are taking but not what screen they're looking at while they're taking notes. You could go a lot crazy and prove that the auditors are not sitting in front of any windows, thereby exposing data to high powered lenses across the street. You could sanitize the data your auditors see, so that the auditor initially sees "Backer N" or "Vendor Y" instead of an actual person or company name. Armed with some variation of the above security narrative, when the auditor says "I'd like to talk to backer N or vendor Y," you can present that narrative to the backer or vendor to secure their permission for auditor access to the information. I wouldn't be surprised if the average backer gets impatient and grants permission well before you're done explaining the security narrative.
- kirillzubovsky 14y agoCongrats. Looking forward to joining the alpha. Interestingly enough, I was skeptical about App.net before I paid the $$, but now I am all excited about it. Maybe you've got something going there :D
- xwowsersx 14y agoJust completed the sign-up, but still get "We don't recognize that username. This is probably because you haven't been invited to our alpha yet. To request an invitation, please email join@app.net." when I try logging in.
- ch 14y agoWell I admit it. I drank the Kool-Aid. Partly to grab my twitter handle, not that I think it was in any danger of being scooped, and partly to see just what is happening on the inside of the walled garden. I can't comment any further, my password I signed up with doesn't seem to work, and the password reset feature also appears broken :) I will reserve judgement for now.
- FireBeyond 14y agoYou definitely did drink the Kool-Aid: "I paid for a product, I can't login, and I can't fix things so I can login. But I'll meekly 'reserve judgment' rather than lambasting what should be a fairly important issue."
- j_s 14y agoMission Accomplished!