6 ms·
The money part of App.net is a red herring
- minimaxir 14y agoAt this point, it seems like there is more people talking about App.net than people potentially using it.
- AznHisoka 14y agoIt's going to be a self-fulfilling conspiracy. All this talk about how it's gonna succeed, and how noone understands it.. sooner or later, some misled company like FB or Google will just acqui-hire App.net for millions of dollars because everyone is talking about it.
- minimaxir 14y agoJust like with Zynga and OMGPOP/Draw Something, and look how that ended up. :P
- damian2000 14y agoGood for OMGPOP...
- bobbles 14y agoSo the author of this post can't see the reason why anyone would want to pay for this, and yet backed the project himself anyway? It reminds me of the people you see who write forums posts like 'I just got my first Mac, now what?' when the answer is always 'do whatever you wanted it for in the first place'
- alexknowshtml 14y agoNo, I can reason the multitude of reasons that someone would pay, including my own. Empathy is a helluva drug.
- 2muchcoffeeman 14y agoThat's not unreasonable. I too have spent money on stuff that I did not understand just to see what it was. It was only $50.
- larrys 14y ago"yet backed the project himself anyway?" Per the OP: "By the way, I put my $50 in out of pure morbid curiosity of what’s under the hood." I think you can both think something probably isn't going to work or have issues with it and support it as a hedge or out of, as he said, "morbid curiosity". People do this with politics quite frequently.
- philwelch 14y ago> People do this with politics quite frequently. Really? Do you have an example? "I didn't really think the war in Iraq would go very well, and I don't really support it; I just wanted to see what would happen."
- pbreit 14y agoProbably referring to giving money to candidates who have no chance of winning. Your bad faith example is ridiculous.
- philwelch 14y agoI couldn't think of a non-ridiculous example, so thanks for providing one. However, your bad faith assumption that I was commenting in bad faith is a dick move.
- larrys 14y agohttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703757504575194502882068296.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870375750457519... http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/06/dueling-donations-lobbyists-lining-pockets-of-both.html http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/06/dueling-donations-lo... You can find examples here of the same individual supporting people in both parties: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/indivs.php http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/indivs.php
- philwelch 14y agoSupporting both parties is just support for the status quo, really, it doesn't really require opposing anything. Supporting individual candidates from both parties is even less suspicious.
- diego 14y ago"By the way, I put my $50 in out of pure morbid curiosity of what’s under the hood. In retrospect, I should’ve donated to a charity." That's a pretty callous way to end a post, Alex. It's not either-or. If you really feel that way, ask for a refund. Donate the money to charity whether you get the refund or not.
- alexknowshtml 14y agoI donate regularly to donorschoose.org and organize a blood drive for the Philly tech scene 3-4x a year. I hope you've got a favorite cause, too :)
- diego 14y agoWell, I'm not the one with second thoughts about my payment to app.net. Still, it's a good chance to mention http://www.nothingbutnets.net/ http://www.nothingbutnets.net/
- alexknowshtml 14y agoSweet. Thanks for sharing.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThe two are orthogonal. App.net is not about charity. Bring that into the conversation is, IMO, trying to confuse the conversation.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- state 14y agoI had the same feeling the minute I completed my payment. I don't feel quite so negative but I feel very, very suspicious.
- 14y ago
- stevebenjamins 14y agoWhat an echo chamber.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 14y agoI completely agree with Alex. I read the "App.net is not vaporware" post by Dalton, but still when watching the video and reading about it all I see is a vague promise and nothing special. He talks a lot about being "aligned with MY interests", but how does he know what those are? Its intentionally vague to avoid discussing hard decisions big companies like Facebook or Twitter need to make every day, regardless of where their funding comes from.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- incision 14y agoIf "reserve your username" wasn't a benefit of pledging, the project wouldn't even have come close to reaching the funding target.
- tsurantino 14y agoI don't know if red herring would be the way to call it, but the general summation that the "success" of App.net is due to marketing (particularly the out-pouring of Dalton Caldwell to the internet masse) is spot on. Most people, especially on HN, pointed to the way "Dalton handled things" as the reason for wanting App.net to succeed. What drives the majority of the activity on App.net are these continuing discussions of what App.net could be, how fantastic it could be and what are the various kinds of pains it would solve. In fact, these very same conversations are as generic and ambiguous as the way that I describe them. Very few specific points are brought up, but rather, there are these sweeping discussions taking place on the platform. I'm kind of curious whether what Dalton is trying to do with app.net is only capable of being accomplished with Twitter and with Twitter only. This is considering Twitter's userbase, Twitter's 3rd party app ecosystem, Twitter's traction and Twitter's history. My point in saying this is that, it's impossible to recreate all this with another service (app.net). They are starting from scratch not only in function, but in context. I'd argue this is what's leading to the ambiguous dynamic and cloudy future for the service.
- sramsay 14y agoI agree that a lot of people are cathecting their desires onto app.net. I'm probably guilty of that as well (and yes, I coughed up the $50). But what got me excited was his basic insight -- not entirely novel, I'll grant -- that any giant social media company selling ads is going to be beholden to advertisers, and that a social media company that is beholden to their users might be a different thing. Lots of things are possible here. The product might suck. They might get totally overwhelmed. They might not be able to sell it. Their API might end up being worse than the others (though it doesn't look that way to me). But people kick in to kickstarter-style things because there's some idea they want to get behind (e.g. "sword fighting games should be better"), even if it doesn't pan out. And to be honest, even the OP -- in the throes of his cynicism -- is obviously experiencing the same sensation.
- sergiotapia 14y agoI don't find a use for app.net at all. 50$/year for a glorified "curated" Twitter clone?
- unimpressive 14y agoMy current suspicion is that Dalton has no idea how to build what he wants, in fact he doesn't even know what the thing he wants is. So he's fanning the flames on this discussion to let everyone else come up with something for him.
- ghshephard 14y ago"Dalton has no idea how to build what he wants" How do you correlate that with the mostly-functional alpha which already has 90% of what I use twitter for? I wasn't expecting anything functional for 5-6 months, and, as it exists, it's already mostly there.
- unimpressive 14y ago>How do you correlate that with the mostly-functional alpha which already has 90% of what I use twitter for? I don't mean technically. I'm sure Dalton is quite qualified to build anything he commits to. I mean he doesn't know how to build it because he doesn't know what he's building. (Yet.)
- alexknowshtml 14y agoI think part of the disappointment people have in twitter stems from the days when TWITTER didn't know what twitter was going to become. It didn't become what they (and Dalton) hoped, so this is an attempt to reboot. Except the rules didn't really change.
- mechanical_fish 14y agoI'm not sure I'm interpreting your phrase "the rules" correctly, but if you mean "the conditions that led Twitter to become what it became"… of course those have changed. Twitter was born in a world that didn't already have a Twitter in it. To argue otherwise is like saying that it made no sense for my parents to have a second child, because they already had one. Aren't two kids, with similar genetics and similar environment, simply redundant? Obviously not. You can't duplicate the original even if you try. Nor is that the point. The point is to diversify. I think Twitter is working fine at the moment – whatever ugly shoe they're allegedly about to drop, it hasn't dropped on me yet. But it's still great to try and reinvent Twitter, just as it was great to try and reinvent Perl, even though Perl still works just fine. You end up somewhere different.
- tkahn6 14y agoCan someone give an example of an application that would be built on top of App.net?
- jasonhitchcock 14y agotweetdeck.
- Hominem 14y agoI think it is probably going to be pretty low volume. Just for fun I would like to see an IRC style realtime interface. Treat hashtags (assuming they have hashtags, I haven't looked past the join page) as channels, read and write as if it were a realtime chat.
- dungwiz 14y agoIsn't the alpha "what he wants to build"?
- newobj 14y agoNot saying this applies to app.net (because I refuse to pay attention to the story), but I'd like to coin a phrase that I imagine may become popular soon: "'strap and dump". There, claim staken.
- charliesome 14y agoSounds similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
- newobj 14y agoThat was the idea :)
- jasonhitchcock 14y agoThere is absolutely no point being made in this post other than "this idea won't succeed". It doesn't why it will fail, just that it will fail. Tautology is becoming a pattern on Subtle blog posts on HN.
- natrius 14y agoI've been arguing that the App.net idea won't succeed for the past few days mainly because I like arguing, especially when I'm right. The App.net company on the other hand, will probably be fine. They just got ~$800k with few strings attached. When they realize that the idea isn't great, they'll probably have enough money left over to change it into something that works.
- gfodor 14y agoapp.net taught me that in 6 months I need to start another twitter clone, except this time the price of entry is $1000. I mean, just imagine the signal to noise ratio there!
- greghinch 14y agoI still don't get App.net. There's no possible way anyone outside of this tiny dev community will actually pay of a service like Twitter, yet there's no way for it to become actually relevant if it's just another echo chamber for startup hipsters
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThis is zero-sum thinking. App.net doesn't have to be as big as Twitter to be successful. There are many pay services to compare it to. Metafilter is one.
- greghinch 14y agoYou're right it wouldn't need to grow to the size of Twitter to be successful, but I don't see how it would grow beyond the HN set (and just a subset then). I can't think a single reason anyone would pay for Twitter, when free Twitter already exists. The only pain point App.net really covers is for 3rd party devs who want to quit their day jobs to sell Twitter iPhone apps but can't any more.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoYou're ignoring the possibility that it will be different from / better than Twitter.
- vandershraaf 14y agoYup, they don't have to be big. Then what's the point of developers to develop on top of app.net API while their user base is small? Less revenue, more "freedom" to develop?
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoSmaller, but willing to pay.
- stock_toaster 14y ago
- OoTheNigerian 14y agoI personally think that this post does not belong to the top of HN for the mere fact that it says nothing. Writing a blogpost speculating about the motivations behind App.net, behind people backing it, the result, the lesson about the post speaking of the fear of money, about how app.net will turnout. Just a bunch of negative speculation bundled together and called a blogpost then to go on to the comments and boast about how charitable you are [1] At worst, APP.NET is an experiment and people found it worthy to spend $50 on this experiment. NO-ONE knows how this thing can/will turn out. I am really looking forward to what the outcome of this project/experiment would be. i.e a real-time messaging API with no fear of the rug being pulled under you by the platform owner. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4379277 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4379277
- alexknowshtml 14y agoI have an honest question for you because I'm trying to understand this mode of thinking myself: why suddenly "no fear" of the rug being pulled out from under you? How does giving Dalton your money permanently align your interests with his? Edit: this isn't meant to accuse Dalton of nefarious plans in the least. I just don't understand the causal link.
- eridius 14y agoBecause the user is the customer. With Twitter, the advertiser is the customer, and the user is the product. This leads to seemingly-capricious changes like the recent backlash against third-party developers. But when the user is the customer, then the business's goals are aligned with the user's.
- alexknowshtml 14y agoI was with you until the last sentence. How does that help developers who are being harmed under the advertiser arrangement? The developers still make up a minority of the user revenue. Even if that flipped...there are multiple customer interests at play. Developers, member users, and the company. No advertisers is better than advertisers, but I don't see anything that protects developers (except Dalton's word, which you didn't bring up) from similar fates in this model.
- gaelian 14y agoBut that blot contains within it a pretty obvious potential to be viewed as a bat though, doesn't it? If it was say, a square with a smaller square inside it, then it's unlikly anyone would interpret it as a bat. I understand the purpose of a Rorschach test (dubious as it may be), and I get the point being made by the OP. But my point is that I have backed App.net because it looks enough like it has the potential to become something useful to me, in a number of ways. I don't feel that there's a bait and switch going on here or that I have been otherwise swindled in some way. And I'm pretty cynical most of the time. Free but ad supported isn't the only way online, but one could be forgiven for thinking it is. I am happy to encourage anyone trying alternatives. I want to see what social services that don't need to cater to advertisers look like, and this is one such model. I wonder why some people appear quite threatened by such. Time will tell if the service turns out to be a bat or not. I approach with few preconceptions, I'm happy to wait it out for a while and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. Seems to me he's doing OK so far.
- guscost 14y agoBoy, a lot of people sure hate this project, don't they?
- alexknowshtml 14y agoI actually don't hate this project, I think it's interesting or else it wouldn't have caught my attention in the first place. I just noticed a few things about it and wrote what I saw.
- guscost 14y agoNot necessarily talking about you.
- slurgfest 14y agoI don't hate it, but I still don't see much use for it. Being free of ads is nice. But it seems to me that the hype for this parallels the hype for Twitter, which was mostly viciously circular: you have to be on Twitter because otherwise you'll miss what's happening on Twitter. Now I am paying $50 to help him build it. I guess that makes sense if you have business ideas for pitching to the people who feel they have to be on Twitter. But I will admit to a little discomfort with how much of the interest is based on projections of everyone else's interest.
- recursive 14y agoI don't use twitter much, but I've never seen ads on it. Where are people seeing ads?
- onedev 14y agoWhat I don't understand is all these people so fervently defending Dalton and his idea. Should we instead approach app.net with some healthy skepticism?
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI think there is definitely something to be said for the view that App.net is this elusive concept that people are wildly dreaming about. Look through at the 100 submissions about App.net per day, there are so many different speculations, even contradictory ones, but not a lot of information coming out. There's a group that thinks App.net is not the point, they think App.net is somehow the social network backbone or "social-network-as-a-service" or something. But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me because App.net is charging. So if you start you're little niche social network "MechanicWorld," which seems like back-to-the-future but ok, are the users paying MechanicWorld or App.net (how would they know App.net exists?). Is MechanicWorld going to offer free signup, provide an advertising based business model, and simply subsidize the free user accounts? If that's the case, what's the point of App.net again? Some people think it is a twitter but for people that visit HN/TechCrunch ... don't those people use Twitter? That's a pretty strange market, but this one is a bit of a strawman, I've only heard it a bit and I don't think Dalton has intention of this. I think it is still very vague what it is and how it will work. I think most concrete, least nebulous, it could be is "Twitter that You Pay For - Period." It has been covered to death, but I don't think you can rival Twitter with that. Do you really see CNN blasting it all over the place, restaurants putting "Follow us on App.net, ($50/yr)," etc? That's the weight, unfortunately Twitter has. Twitter has people believing they are responsible for the Arab Spring (yeah right) -- I don't know how App.net is going to get this kind of press. And the other thing, App.net, really? That's the name? When I first heard about it, I thought "Oh, ok they seem to have some completely unrelated business already and are just using this 'App.net' thing temporarily" but I don't see anything implying that is going to change; I'm going to assume someone is working on this, because that's no name for what they're trying to do (whatever it is exactly). Nevertheless, it is nice to see something besides "We are revolutionizing the way users share photos or communicate" "... but we don't know how we're going to make money -- advertising?"
- MarkPNeyer 14y agoi looked at the rorsach image on his site out of curiosity. i saw two people facing away from each other, their index fingers raised as if to say "nope, we're not part of a rorsach blot"
- paulsutter 14y agoI agree with the title but not the article. App.net is an API-centric twitter. The fact that it costs money or doesn't have advertising is secondary. Sure, it's probably a requirement for an API-centric twitter, but the API-centricity is the real actual key. ps - Dalton, understand why reserved twitter names is for contributors only, but you might want a feature like _twittername as a sub-namespace for twitter reserved names that are aliases for real app.net names. Just sayin.
- ixobelle 14y agoIt's a paralyzingly epidemic.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nivertech 14y agoDevelopers overpaying for app.net: Apple iOS Registered Developer - $99/yr - TAM: 365M iOS devices Google Play for Developers - $25 one-time fee - TAM: 400M Android devices App.net developer tier - $100/yr - TAM: 10K+ members
- vignesh_vs_in 14y agoOn a side note: The ink blot does look like a bat.