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I'm not really sure what the purpose of this service is. ... I myself wouldn't pay to use Facebook minus the ads. You answered your own question above, and als

I'm not really sure what the purpose of this service is. ... I myself wouldn't pay to use Facebook minus the ads. You answered your own question above, and also identified why app.net won't interest you. If you're okay with ads, then I think you'd get zero utility from app.net

dkrich 14y ago
I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer the question of what the service provides that Facebook or Twitter doesn't. Are ads in and of themselves really a huge problem? I don't find myself often annoyed by them. Now if there were a systemic change to the service because you didn't have to alter the experience for users to generate ad revenue, then I begin to understand. However if this is the idea, then in what ways the service would be different is exactly what I'm trying to figure out. Remember, there are two sides to the coin "we offer a better experience without the ads" method. First of all you are going to get a smaller user base. So how much are you going to charge? $5/month? $10/month? You would need to get a pretty massive user base to be able to pay the overhead and attract top engineering talent, so in the end I'm not sure you'd be a whole lot better off.
- chimi 14y ago
  It's more fundamentally about this: Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)? A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe when a company focuses on them as a customer rather than them as eyeballs to be sold to advertisers, who are the customer, then a better service is the outcome for the users of the service. With app.net the user is the customer. With Facebook and Twitter, the user is the product. With App.Net user interests and service provider interests are aligned. The provider wants the service to be better for the users. With Facebook and Twitter and other ad supported products the users who value their privacy have intentions which are constantly at odds with the service provider whose intention is to continually open up details about the individuals so that those details can be used to improve ad success rates and profitability.
  - mcantelon 14y ago
    And then there's Diaspora and Identica where you're neither product nor customer...
    - zcam 14y ago
      Or you could just install AdBlock. The argument about privacy doesn't really makes sense either, it is still a private company/product.
      - mcantelon 14y ago
        True. One advantage of a paid social network I haven't heard mentioned is the fact spam likely won't exist as it does on Twitter.
        joering2 14y ago
        What made you assume that just because app will be subscription-based, there will be large enough portion of that $$ cheddar that will make app less spammy then, for example, Twitter? Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50? Ultimately, its up to Dalton and his executive skills (is he going to be the CEO?) to build a company's structure and split the fee the smart way (have a decent anti-spam team) to keep the site fun and clean [of spam].
        mcantelon 14y ago
        >Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50? True, that alone might not do it. The $50 paired with a rudimentary reporting system might limit the use of a single account to a small time period in which the ROI wouldn't be worth it.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- simondlr 14y ago
  The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. The result is, as Dalton mentioned that they HAVE to cater for their users who are the same people who pay them. If your users are your customers, you've got an easier game to play. As a developer, I'm a lot more excited about it. I backed mainly because I was so excited about an API that could've been what Twitter promised. I'm especially excited to see what annotations is going to emerge through it. To explain it in short: Any app can now embed any information in a post. This is big. To give a small example: Say people who allow IFTTT to post their music to app.net. IFTTT can decided to add meta information to it (adding song titles, artists, etc). Now anyone else can easily extract this information. There is a whole underlying network waiting to be discovered. Anything can now live within in it. What if you wanted to do an instagram type app? Ask users with app.net accounts to log in. When they post a photo, add your own information to it (photo title, photo url, etc). In the normal app.net (alpha) interface, you won't miss anything. You'll just see someone posting a photo. However, now this new instagram type app can extract this information from a user's feed, using app.net's infrastructure as their social backbone! Any social service can live on app.net's infrastructure now.
  - qqqqqq 14y ago
    >The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. IMO, the people who care about ads on social networking have Adblock+ installed. I would even go so far as to throw this (very probably unsourcable statement) and say that most users don't care about ads, period. The one thing that pulls me to social networking is people, not the ads. A social network isn't social or a network if there aren't people I know or care about using it.
    - simondlr 14y ago
      You didn't read the next sentence. It is not inherently ads that are the problem, it is the fact from a company's perspective you have to cater to a) the advertisers who are paying you money vs b) your users who aren't. Currently, I'm okay in paying $50 to get access to a great community of early adopters (lets admit, it is mostly tech people). I'm not naive to expect it won't change, but once killer apps start popping up on the ecosystem, more users will join which will bring back the value that the older social networks provided.
- dave_sullivan 14y ago
  As I understood it, it's largely about aligning user and producer interests. At facebook, they have engineers devoted to pleasing users, and others devoted to pleasing advertisers. It's a difficult line to walk, but it's a legitimate argument that advertisers may win in the end because Facebook is now a public company and must show positive earnings growth and all that. App.net (I think) is proposing that if that line does not exist, they can focus 100% on building a product that users will love using, rather than something that strikes a balance between pleasing users and advertisers. I could see this being a better product in general. All your concerns are valid though. I'm not on facebook myself, so this service itself has absolutely no appeal to me--however, I do think there are some good points behind the premise, and I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of people do use facebook pretty frequently.
  - EwanToo 14y ago
    App.net will have a very similar problem - walking the line between developers who want to "Just add feature x, so my killer app that I've not built yet will work", and between users who just want a high quality functional service. The reality is there's always going to be pressures from different directions, there's nothing special about app.net in that regard. I wish them well, but I don't expect to be paying for access any time soon.
- achompas 14y ago
  Again, you answered in your first 3 sentences. The propsed absence of advertising on app.net will change how users interact with the service, as well as how the service grows. Twitter and Facebook wants to market to their users. This now influences all of their product decisions! Any changes to the service aim to increase CPM. I won't debate whether that makes FB/Twitter better or worse, but they are fundamentally different than a product which does not seek, above all else, to raise money by advertising to its users. Here are some ways in which a paid service might differ from an ad-based service: (1) No ads means no B2B sales team, which means more money to hire developers. (2) The product pipeline looks different without ads. Would Twitter have featured "Explore" so prominently if it wasn't a central hub for advertising? Would they have de-emphasized direct messages? (3) Lower infrastructure costs and dev time related to scaling. A smaller user base, in this case, will require less supporting infrastructure and a simpler code base. Both of these save app.net money and dev time, allowing the team to focus on features. (4) Analytics and research will have a different purpose. Instead of analyzing user behavior to identify ideal ad placement or selection, App.net will try to identify the best features and cull the worst in an attempt to keep users around.
  - davidw 14y ago
    The question is: what is most valuable to most people? * Having a slightly nicer experience or * Having all their friends and potential friends on the same service For a social service, door number 2 (positive network externalities) would be my guess.
    - sanderjd 14y ago
      I don't really disagree with you, but you've editorialized door number 1 to make the answer more obvious. Door number 1 is a different experience (because of the points listed in the post you replied to), which may be any of "slightly nicer", "slightly less nice", "way nicer", or ????. The point is that it will be different, whether that difference provides more or less value than ad-supported alternatives remains to be seen.
      - 14y ago
tptacek 14y ago
Not true. I didn't support App.net and am not optimistic about it, but there is a much larger potential value proposition to App.net than "not seeing ads": App.net promises to allow arbitrary 3rd party clients in a way Twitter won't, because Twitter will suppress 3rd party clients that harm its ad ecosystem.
natrius 14y ago
This sort of service depends on network effects. I suspect that 90+% of Twitter and Facebook users aren't willing to pay $50 to get rid of ads. If even Google is having trouble getting traction with a social networking product, I don't see why anyone is confident that a social network users have to pay for will end up with a large enough user base to be useful.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  > I suspect that 90+% of Twitter and Facebook users aren't willing to pay $50 to get rid of ads. Yes. But I have no interest in talking to +90% of the people on Twitter and Facebook. The success of app.net won't depend on how many total users sign up over the services lifetime. It will depend more on how interesting the people who ultimately sign up are. A lot of it is perception, right now twitter is something of a worldwide telegraph broadcast service, you say something in 140 characters to as many people as humanly possible. You're trying to garner as many likes and followers as you can. App.net can't compete as a broadcast service, they don't; and never will have the userbase to do so. I feel like they'll have to differentiate themselves in some other way to be successful. If the conversations end up anything near as inane as twitter it's doomed.
  - natrius 14y ago
    "It will depend more on how interesting the people who ultimately sign up are." I don't see how this is true. If my friends aren't on App.net, I'll still use Facebook. If the people who discuss the issues that I tend to tweet about aren't on App.net, I'll still use Twitter. What will I then gain by using App.net as well, especially since most App.net users will probably syndicate their posts to Twitter?
    - unimpressive 14y ago
      I just wanted to let you know that I do intend on answering your question, but am currently trying to evaluate if I've stumbled onto a point that is hard to articulate without sounding stupid, or just stupid. I'll ping you when I resolve this problem.
rubashov 14y ago
As I read your post I realized app.net is probably for me. It's like lower Manhattan or parts of San Francisco. People who think the rents are ridiculous shouldn't live there anyway; it's not for them.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  Thanks for your honesty. This is what a lot of people here seem to be thinking but don't dare to say out loud: Twitter without the "little people". Because you're worth it!

dkrich 14y ago

I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer the question of what the service provides that Facebook or Twitter doesn't. Are ads in and of themselves really a huge problem? I don't find myself often annoyed by them. Now if there were a systemic change to the service because you didn't have to alter the experience for users to generate ad revenue, then I begin to understand. However if this is the idea, then in what ways the service would be different is exactly what I'm trying to figure out. Remember, there are two sides to the coin "we offer a better experience without the ads" method. First of all you are going to get a smaller user base. So how much are you going to charge? $5/month? $10/month? You would need to get a pretty massive user base to be able to pay the overhead and attract top engineering talent, so in the end I'm not sure you'd be a whole lot better off.

chimi 14y ago
It's more fundamentally about this: Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)? A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe when a company focuses on them as a customer rather than them as eyeballs to be sold to advertisers, who are the customer, then a better service is the outcome for the users of the service. With app.net the user is the customer. With Facebook and Twitter, the user is the product. With App.Net user interests and service provider interests are aligned. The provider wants the service to be better for the users. With Facebook and Twitter and other ad supported products the users who value their privacy have intentions which are constantly at odds with the service provider whose intention is to continually open up details about the individuals so that those details can be used to improve ad success rates and profitability.
- mcantelon 14y ago
  And then there's Diaspora and Identica where you're neither product nor customer...
  - zcam 14y ago
    Or you could just install AdBlock. The argument about privacy doesn't really makes sense either, it is still a private company/product.
    - mcantelon 14y ago
      True. One advantage of a paid social network I haven't heard mentioned is the fact spam likely won't exist as it does on Twitter.
      - joering2 14y ago
        What made you assume that just because app will be subscription-based, there will be large enough portion of that $$ cheddar that will make app less spammy then, for example, Twitter? Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50? Ultimately, its up to Dalton and his executive skills (is he going to be the CEO?) to build a company's structure and split the fee the smart way (have a decent anti-spam team) to keep the site fun and clean [of spam].
        mcantelon 14y ago
        >Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50? True, that alone might not do it. The $50 paired with a rudimentary reporting system might limit the use of a single account to a small time period in which the ROI wouldn't be worth it.
- jasonlotito 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
simondlr 14y ago
The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. The result is, as Dalton mentioned that they HAVE to cater for their users who are the same people who pay them. If your users are your customers, you've got an easier game to play. As a developer, I'm a lot more excited about it. I backed mainly because I was so excited about an API that could've been what Twitter promised. I'm especially excited to see what annotations is going to emerge through it. To explain it in short: Any app can now embed any information in a post. This is big. To give a small example: Say people who allow IFTTT to post their music to app.net. IFTTT can decided to add meta information to it (adding song titles, artists, etc). Now anyone else can easily extract this information. There is a whole underlying network waiting to be discovered. Anything can now live within in it. What if you wanted to do an instagram type app? Ask users with app.net accounts to log in. When they post a photo, add your own information to it (photo title, photo url, etc). In the normal app.net (alpha) interface, you won't miss anything. You'll just see someone posting a photo. However, now this new instagram type app can extract this information from a user's feed, using app.net's infrastructure as their social backbone! Any social service can live on app.net's infrastructure now.
- qqqqqq 14y ago
  >The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. IMO, the people who care about ads on social networking have Adblock+ installed. I would even go so far as to throw this (very probably unsourcable statement) and say that most users don't care about ads, period. The one thing that pulls me to social networking is people, not the ads. A social network isn't social or a network if there aren't people I know or care about using it.
  - simondlr 14y ago
    You didn't read the next sentence. It is not inherently ads that are the problem, it is the fact from a company's perspective you have to cater to a) the advertisers who are paying you money vs b) your users who aren't. Currently, I'm okay in paying $50 to get access to a great community of early adopters (lets admit, it is mostly tech people). I'm not naive to expect it won't change, but once killer apps start popping up on the ecosystem, more users will join which will bring back the value that the older social networks provided.
dave_sullivan 14y ago
As I understood it, it's largely about aligning user and producer interests. At facebook, they have engineers devoted to pleasing users, and others devoted to pleasing advertisers. It's a difficult line to walk, but it's a legitimate argument that advertisers may win in the end because Facebook is now a public company and must show positive earnings growth and all that. App.net (I think) is proposing that if that line does not exist, they can focus 100% on building a product that users will love using, rather than something that strikes a balance between pleasing users and advertisers. I could see this being a better product in general. All your concerns are valid though. I'm not on facebook myself, so this service itself has absolutely no appeal to me--however, I do think there are some good points behind the premise, and I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of people do use facebook pretty frequently.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  App.net will have a very similar problem - walking the line between developers who want to "Just add feature x, so my killer app that I've not built yet will work", and between users who just want a high quality functional service. The reality is there's always going to be pressures from different directions, there's nothing special about app.net in that regard. I wish them well, but I don't expect to be paying for access any time soon.
achompas 14y ago
Again, you answered in your first 3 sentences. The propsed absence of advertising on app.net will change how users interact with the service, as well as how the service grows. Twitter and Facebook wants to market to their users. This now influences all of their product decisions! Any changes to the service aim to increase CPM. I won't debate whether that makes FB/Twitter better or worse, but they are fundamentally different than a product which does not seek, above all else, to raise money by advertising to its users. Here are some ways in which a paid service might differ from an ad-based service: (1) No ads means no B2B sales team, which means more money to hire developers. (2) The product pipeline looks different without ads. Would Twitter have featured "Explore" so prominently if it wasn't a central hub for advertising? Would they have de-emphasized direct messages? (3) Lower infrastructure costs and dev time related to scaling. A smaller user base, in this case, will require less supporting infrastructure and a simpler code base. Both of these save app.net money and dev time, allowing the team to focus on features. (4) Analytics and research will have a different purpose. Instead of analyzing user behavior to identify ideal ad placement or selection, App.net will try to identify the best features and cull the worst in an attempt to keep users around.
- davidw 14y ago
  The question is: what is most valuable to most people? * Having a slightly nicer experience or * Having all their friends and potential friends on the same service For a social service, door number 2 (positive network externalities) would be my guess.
  - sanderjd 14y ago
    I don't really disagree with you, but you've editorialized door number 1 to make the answer more obvious. Door number 1 is a different experience (because of the points listed in the post you replied to), which may be any of "slightly nicer", "slightly less nice", "way nicer", or ????. The point is that it will be different, whether that difference provides more or less value than ad-supported alternatives remains to be seen.
    - 14y ago

tptacek 14y ago

Not true. I didn't support App.net and am not optimistic about it, but there is a much larger potential value proposition to App.net than "not seeing ads": App.net promises to allow arbitrary 3rd party clients in a way Twitter won't, because Twitter will suppress 3rd party clients that harm its ad ecosystem.

natrius 14y ago

This sort of service depends on network effects. I suspect that 90+% of Twitter and Facebook users aren't willing to pay $50 to get rid of ads. If even Google is having trouble getting traction with a social networking product, I don't see why anyone is confident that a social network users have to pay for will end up with a large enough user base to be useful.

unimpressive 14y ago
> I suspect that 90+% of Twitter and Facebook users aren't willing to pay $50 to get rid of ads. Yes. But I have no interest in talking to +90% of the people on Twitter and Facebook. The success of app.net won't depend on how many total users sign up over the services lifetime. It will depend more on how interesting the people who ultimately sign up are. A lot of it is perception, right now twitter is something of a worldwide telegraph broadcast service, you say something in 140 characters to as many people as humanly possible. You're trying to garner as many likes and followers as you can. App.net can't compete as a broadcast service, they don't; and never will have the userbase to do so. I feel like they'll have to differentiate themselves in some other way to be successful. If the conversations end up anything near as inane as twitter it's doomed.
- natrius 14y ago
  "It will depend more on how interesting the people who ultimately sign up are." I don't see how this is true. If my friends aren't on App.net, I'll still use Facebook. If the people who discuss the issues that I tend to tweet about aren't on App.net, I'll still use Twitter. What will I then gain by using App.net as well, especially since most App.net users will probably syndicate their posts to Twitter?
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    I just wanted to let you know that I do intend on answering your question, but am currently trying to evaluate if I've stumbled onto a point that is hard to articulate without sounding stupid, or just stupid. I'll ping you when I resolve this problem.

rubashov 14y ago

As I read your post I realized app.net is probably for me. It's like lower Manhattan or parts of San Francisco. People who think the rents are ridiculous shouldn't live there anyway; it's not for them.

tripzilch 14y ago
Thanks for your honesty. This is what a lot of people here seem to be thinking but don't dare to say out loud: Twitter without the "little people". Because you're worth it!