7 ms·

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 themsel

by 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
  > Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)? So, what explicit rights does the customer have over that which they get with Facebook or Twitter? Do I have voting rights for features? Is the business model solid? I mean, $500,000 is great and all, but that needs to last an entire year all while supporting future development. Sure, they can get new people on board, but what's their plan for that? As for being the customer, it means little. As we've learned from experience, being a customer doesn't mean anything. You ask a question about being the product or being the customer as if being a customer actually gives you something, when in reality, it doesn't. I mean, in this case, you get a years worth of service. After that, nothing else is promised. So, beyond the years worth of service, what do you really get? What are they promising? Because so far from what I see, the reality differs from the promise.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    Excellent point. I've been the customer of many services that still either close or get bought out by companies that I didn't want to do business with in the first place. I had no real 'rights' as a customer. Just because I'm not the product via ad views doesn't mean I (as part of a large customer base) don't make an excellent acquisition/takeover target. Will Caldwell sell out for $10 million? Probably not. Might he sell out for, say... $300 million? Possibly, and then I've yet again been turned in to a product for sale.
    - jkbyc 14y ago
      That's one of the reasons why a distributed open-source version of the service might be the best option.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - noblethrasher 14y ago
    At the very least it means that I - as someone that values privacy - do not have to be in a necessarily antagonistic relationship with the company that provides the service.
- natrius 14y ago
  "Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?" Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    > Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it? Where's the evidence that suggests millions of people have to join?
    - natrius 14y ago
      Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable. Personally, I use Twitter mostly to talk to people in the fields I work in, namely hacking and journalism. I don't see how either of those communities will move to App.net wholesale. If you want me to pay money just to have a conversation with you, I'm probably going to decide to just not have the conversation. Ads on Facebook and Twitter don't bother me. I won't be paying to get rid of them. I don't even use AdBlock to get rid of them for free (partially because I think it's unethical to do).
      - ceejayoz 14y ago
        > Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable. My first post on Twitter was "trying to figure out WTF Twitter is". I subsequently didn't post for six months. I wouldn't judge the platform on what's posted in the first 30 days of existence. As for sustainability, $500k in revenue is more than Twitter had for years.
        natrius 14y ago
        I'm not judging the platform on its first 30 days. I just don't see a path to it being useful. What's the path that you see?
- a3_nm 14y ago
  > A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe ... It seems to me that the vast majority of people do not care and will just use whatever everyone else is using. If open-source, federated alternatives such as Identica do not have many users, then I don't understand how App.net can hope to get enough to matter.
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

by dkrich 14y ago

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
> Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)? So, what explicit rights does the customer have over that which they get with Facebook or Twitter? Do I have voting rights for features? Is the business model solid? I mean, $500,000 is great and all, but that needs to last an entire year all while supporting future development. Sure, they can get new people on board, but what's their plan for that? As for being the customer, it means little. As we've learned from experience, being a customer doesn't mean anything. You ask a question about being the product or being the customer as if being a customer actually gives you something, when in reality, it doesn't. I mean, in this case, you get a years worth of service. After that, nothing else is promised. So, beyond the years worth of service, what do you really get? What are they promising? Because so far from what I see, the reality differs from the promise.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Excellent point. I've been the customer of many services that still either close or get bought out by companies that I didn't want to do business with in the first place. I had no real 'rights' as a customer. Just because I'm not the product via ad views doesn't mean I (as part of a large customer base) don't make an excellent acquisition/takeover target. Will Caldwell sell out for $10 million? Probably not. Might he sell out for, say... $300 million? Possibly, and then I've yet again been turned in to a product for sale.
  - jkbyc 14y ago
    That's one of the reasons why a distributed open-source version of the service might be the best option.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- noblethrasher 14y ago
  At the very least it means that I - as someone that values privacy - do not have to be in a necessarily antagonistic relationship with the company that provides the service.
natrius 14y ago
"Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?" Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  > Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it? Where's the evidence that suggests millions of people have to join?
  - natrius 14y ago
    Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable. Personally, I use Twitter mostly to talk to people in the fields I work in, namely hacking and journalism. I don't see how either of those communities will move to App.net wholesale. If you want me to pay money just to have a conversation with you, I'm probably going to decide to just not have the conversation. Ads on Facebook and Twitter don't bother me. I won't be paying to get rid of them. I don't even use AdBlock to get rid of them for free (partially because I think it's unethical to do).
    - ceejayoz 14y ago
      > Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable. My first post on Twitter was "trying to figure out WTF Twitter is". I subsequently didn't post for six months. I wouldn't judge the platform on what's posted in the first 30 days of existence. As for sustainability, $500k in revenue is more than Twitter had for years.
      - natrius 14y ago
        I'm not judging the platform on its first 30 days. I just don't see a path to it being useful. What's the path that you see?
a3_nm 14y ago
> A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe ... It seems to me that the vast majority of people do not care and will just use whatever everyone else is using. If open-source, federated alternatives such as Identica do not have many users, then I don't understand how App.net can hope to get enough to matter.

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