5 ms·

App.net: or why you shouldn't copy a successful company

46 points by astrojams 14y ago

therealarmen 14y ago
Early Reports indicate that App.net is not generating very much user engagement. In fact, most of their 10,000 daily posts come from about 250 users, a far shot from Twitter’s 150 million users and 350 million tweets. That's not a fair comparison. How many users did Twitter have a month after launching?
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  The number of users is irrelevant when measuring user engagement, at least when it is defined as the article describes. (But comparing early app.net versus a more mature Twitter may be relevant.) To calculate user engagement they should take the number of daily posts and divide by the number of users (so with these numbers, for Twitter it is 350 million/150 million = 2.33 and for app.net it is 10,000/[# of app.net users...20,000 according to the study linked to by diego] = 0.5. This isn't necessarily the best metric since somebody could easily write a bot that makes several posts per second, which could skew things considerably. (I don't think anyone cares about how active peoples' bots are.) It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users.
  - diego 14y ago
    "It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users" It's not only possible, it's certain. The average Twitter user doesn't tweet very much. I don't know if it's 5% or 1% that's responsible for half the tweets (I could find out), but it's definitely a small minority. This is expected for every content-based social network. http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-2012 http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-20...
- __chrismc 14y ago
  Indeed. I keep seeing these sorts of posts all over the place today... "Ohnoes, App.Net doesn't have millions of users yet - it's a failure." Rubbish. It's been around a month or so, and is only really known in tech-circles at the moment. They have managed to convince a significant number of people to sign up for a service when they can access a larger competitor for _free_. That in itself is a pretty big success. It's too early to call App.Net a success or failure. Maybe it got too much press too early, and that has given people unrealistic expectations? I say come back and look at the numbers in 12-18 months. Then we'll be looking at a mature service, and will know how many users they added, or convinced to renew their subscription.
- bhughes 14y ago
  At the same time it has received a ton of press up-front, in exactly the circles early adopters of the service would frequent. I think there is a feeling (right or wrong) that if the problems App.net purports to solve were really as bad as claimed, people would have been jumping on in droves, at least to give it a good spin around the block.
- diego 14y ago
  Agree, that doesn't mean anything. My study was misinterpreted: those users are generating a TON of posts. The top poster has close to 6000. There is a long tail of thousands of users who are pretty engaged. They are just not posting like crazy! Here's the earlier discussion of my post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487816 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487816
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  Its actually quite fair. When Twitter launched there was no Twitter. Now App.net is basically Twitter for a certain segment of the market. You can compare them now because people are already familiar with and have proved to be ready to adopt the idea. Now if App.net was a direct competitor from the early days of Twitter then it'd be less fair.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
stesch 14y ago
Not enough payment methods available. I would have an account if they would offer paypal.
mdonahoe 14y ago
Im not convinced that app.net needs to beat twitters numbers to win. If they continue with the paid membership model, then they can carve a nice niche in the developer community. Not related to his point, but he isn't actually part of Svbtle, right? Not that it really matters, though I bet that annoys the hell out of dcurtis.
- auston 14y ago
  & me, i wish people wouldn't do that! it makes me subconsciously discount their opinion.
- mirsadm 14y ago
  Isn't Twitters success mostly attributed to its mainstream user adoption? I'm not sure how app.net can survive on a niche developer community if that community is building on top of a platform that caters to itself.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Sigh. One of the most discouraging things of Internet 'Culture' is to be the person who said "X is a failure" first, as some sort of street cred. Come back in a year or two or three and then tell me its dead, but a couple of months in? Really? Hard to plot a trend line with one data point.
- shawndumas 14y ago
  http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png
pspeter3 14y ago
My favorite part of this is that he criticizes App.net for copying but is using a Wordpress themes that copies Svbtle and does so pretty blatantly with the WP-SVBTLE tag at the bottom left
- Karunamon 14y ago
  It's a theme that you otherwise would not have access to unless you're part of the elite few that are actually allowed to post at Svbtle. I like the way it looks, personally. It's on Github: https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle And from that page: Isn't this unoriginal? Yes, in the same way svbtle is unoriginal. See the original ["inspiration" for svbtle] (http://drawar.com http://drawar.com)
  - tptacek 14y ago
    The Atlantic Monthly has a theme that is only available to people the Atlantic Monthly has hired to blog for them. The purpose of this theme is not to capitalize on the same design ideas as Svbtle (that's what the DRAWAR.COM link alludes to). The purpose of the theme is to dilute SVBTLE.COM because the author is so insecure that not being invited to a group blog makes them bitter. A willingness to publish under one's own name using this silly WP-SVBTLE theme says way more about the author of the blog than it does about Svbtle.
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      >A willingness to publish under one's own name using this silly WP-SVBTLE theme says way more about the author of the blog The Atlantic theme looks like a fairly generic news website, to be honest. That said, wow. You are reading a lot of personal bias into choice of website theme. I was planning on grabbing this for my personal one just because I really, really like how it looks. If it's going to tick off people who over-extrapolate, so much the better ;)
      - tptacek 14y ago
        I think it's a very bad idea to use this theme for your personal blog, regardless of what you think of Svbtle. But if you want your choice of blog theme to compete for attention with your ideas, that's your call.
xianshou 14y ago
The problem is not under-usage per se, but hype. Caldwell's soapboxing about Twitter's failure to live up to its potential raised expectations, but didn't provide a solution to the chicken-egg problem. I'm sure Caldwell & co can build a great API and app platform, but that all becomes relevant and compelling only once App.net can grow a community a respectable fraction (1%?) of Twitter's size. Of course, as noted elsewhere, it's too early to pass judgment - but it's also a good reminder that unless you like throwing around $50s (http://ihave50dollars.com/ http://ihave50dollars.com/), App.net won't matter to you for a good while yet.
scott_to_s 14y ago
Apart from the fact that it's extremely early days for App.net right now, this article assumes that Twitter will remain as it is now, and not deteriorate further with significantly increased levels of advertising and spam. App.net will likely become increasingly attractive as Twitter becomes more "manipulated" to deliver on those promised eyeballs. I've paid up for App.net because I have a zero tolerance policy to advertising, and I don't want to be involved with services that have their primary business model built around marketing and advertising. In this case App.net is not aping Twitter, because Twitter will never indulge the idea of a world without advertising.
- jyap 14y ago
  You also do not read magazines, newspapers or watch television? You also do not use Google or Twitter (this isn't you? https://twitter.com/scott_to_s https://twitter.com/scott_to_s)?
  - scott_to_s 14y ago
    Yes, that's me. And no, I don't watch terrestrial TV, or read magazines. Yes, I use Twitter now, but I'd like to move away from it, especially if it continues to move in the direction that it's going... hence my subscription to App.net and my comment that you're responding to. The fact that I have a Twitter account means that it is curretly useful for me, but it doesn't change my stance on advertising, which I do not tolerate. I also use Twitter via a client that does not pollute my stream with advertising, but this cannot last. I'm quite happy to pay for a service that doesn't advertise or sell eyeballs.
jaseemabid 14y ago
twitter irritates the least with ads. The same thing for linkedin or facebook would have been a lot better. Wait.. where is diaspora?
RandallBrown 14y ago
>For an end user, App.net looks exactly like Twitter and it won’t improve their experience in any relevant way that will make them want to switch. The whole point of App.net is to be an API for other apps to be built on. The "Alpha" app or whatever is a twitter clone, but that doesn't mean that every app built on it will be.
jjacobson 14y ago
I'm glad Tim Berners Lee built a protocol instead of a platform.
salman89 14y ago
OP is missing the point. I don't think App.net is going out to be a Twitter replacement. I don't think App.net requires the critical mass or wide spread popularity that Twitter enjoys. Its a niche product that is serving a very particular purpose. I wish that some blogger or journalist would try to evaluate App.net on what its setting out to be, not comparing it to Twitter. At the end of the day, App.net will be a paid service. It's not fair to compare it to Twitter. There is some overlap, but for the most part this is a different market segment.
- eurleif 14y ago
  I must have missed something. What is the very particular purpose that app.net serves? What is it supposed to be used for?
kyt 14y ago
All social networks suffer from 90/10 rule (90% of the content is generated by 10% of the users), so this really isn't surprising. Other posters have mentioned this as well, but I think Twitter has too much momentum. Someone trying to do the exact same thing from the end-user perspective isn't going to be able to compete.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
In my mind, app.net is incredibly interesting, but not because it is like Twitter. If app.net is going to be successful, it is going to be because they become very not-like-twitter, by becoming critical infrastructure that applications can easily talk together with. In my mind, app.net's competitor isn't Twitter, it's HTTP.
gauravsc 14y ago
Why are you finding problems with app.net instead of focussing on it;s good parts and possibilities. You say and talk about some fundamental differences with companies facebook and apple, but why should anyone believe your assessment. Future can not be predicted in the world of technology and app.net has a good chance like any other company.
andrewhillman 14y ago
I am not a paid supporter of app.net nor have I seen what they have built to date but I'd put money on app.net evolving into something different than what it is today. For those of you who paid into supporting app.net, I think you paid into the people behind app.net and not app.net itself. Give them time to flesh things out before you critique.
goggles99 14y ago
Yeah, I guess the NFL season has started - here comes the Arm Chair quarterbacks. What did you expect from App.net. I think you are suffering from setting your expectations too high. It is designed to fill a niche - and it actually has a more sustainable financial outlook than Twitter.

46 points by astrojams 14y ago

Early Reports indicate that App.net is not generating very much user engagement. In fact, most of their 10,000 daily posts come from about 250 users, a far shot from Twitter’s 150 million users and 350 million tweets. That's not a fair comparison. How many users did Twitter have a month after launching?

jaredsohn 14y ago
The number of users is irrelevant when measuring user engagement, at least when it is defined as the article describes. (But comparing early app.net versus a more mature Twitter may be relevant.) To calculate user engagement they should take the number of daily posts and divide by the number of users (so with these numbers, for Twitter it is 350 million/150 million = 2.33 and for app.net it is 10,000/[# of app.net users...20,000 according to the study linked to by diego] = 0.5. This isn't necessarily the best metric since somebody could easily write a bot that makes several posts per second, which could skew things considerably. (I don't think anyone cares about how active peoples' bots are.) It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users.
- diego 14y ago
  "It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users" It's not only possible, it's certain. The average Twitter user doesn't tweet very much. I don't know if it's 5% or 1% that's responsible for half the tweets (I could find out), but it's definitely a small minority. This is expected for every content-based social network. http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-2012 http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-20...
__chrismc 14y ago
Indeed. I keep seeing these sorts of posts all over the place today... "Ohnoes, App.Net doesn't have millions of users yet - it's a failure." Rubbish. It's been around a month or so, and is only really known in tech-circles at the moment. They have managed to convince a significant number of people to sign up for a service when they can access a larger competitor for _free_. That in itself is a pretty big success. It's too early to call App.Net a success or failure. Maybe it got too much press too early, and that has given people unrealistic expectations? I say come back and look at the numbers in 12-18 months. Then we'll be looking at a mature service, and will know how many users they added, or convinced to renew their subscription.
bhughes 14y ago
At the same time it has received a ton of press up-front, in exactly the circles early adopters of the service would frequent. I think there is a feeling (right or wrong) that if the problems App.net purports to solve were really as bad as claimed, people would have been jumping on in droves, at least to give it a good spin around the block.
diego 14y ago
Agree, that doesn't mean anything. My study was misinterpreted: those users are generating a TON of posts. The top poster has close to 6000. There is a long tail of thousands of users who are pretty engaged. They are just not posting like crazy! Here's the earlier discussion of my post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487816 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487816
bpatrianakos 14y ago
Its actually quite fair. When Twitter launched there was no Twitter. Now App.net is basically Twitter for a certain segment of the market. You can compare them now because people are already familiar with and have proved to be ready to adopt the idea. Now if App.net was a direct competitor from the early days of Twitter then it'd be less fair.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

stesch 14y ago

Not enough payment methods available. I would have an account if they would offer paypal.

mdonahoe 14y ago

Im not convinced that app.net needs to beat twitters numbers to win. If they continue with the paid membership model, then they can carve a nice niche in the developer community. Not related to his point, but he isn't actually part of Svbtle, right? Not that it really matters, though I bet that annoys the hell out of dcurtis.

auston 14y ago
& me, i wish people wouldn't do that! it makes me subconsciously discount their opinion.
mirsadm 14y ago
Isn't Twitters success mostly attributed to its mainstream user adoption? I'm not sure how app.net can survive on a niche developer community if that community is building on top of a platform that caters to itself.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Sigh. One of the most discouraging things of Internet 'Culture' is to be the person who said "X is a failure" first, as some sort of street cred. Come back in a year or two or three and then tell me its dead, but a couple of months in? Really? Hard to plot a trend line with one data point.

shawndumas 14y ago
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png

pspeter3 14y ago

My favorite part of this is that he criticizes App.net for copying but is using a Wordpress themes that copies Svbtle and does so pretty blatantly with the WP-SVBTLE tag at the bottom left

Karunamon 14y ago
It's a theme that you otherwise would not have access to unless you're part of the elite few that are actually allowed to post at Svbtle. I like the way it looks, personally. It's on Github: https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle And from that page: Isn't this unoriginal? Yes, in the same way svbtle is unoriginal. See the original ["inspiration" for svbtle] (http://drawar.com http://drawar.com)
- tptacek 14y ago
  The Atlantic Monthly has a theme that is only available to people the Atlantic Monthly has hired to blog for them. The purpose of this theme is not to capitalize on the same design ideas as Svbtle (that's what the DRAWAR.COM link alludes to). The purpose of the theme is to dilute SVBTLE.COM because the author is so insecure that not being invited to a group blog makes them bitter. A willingness to publish under one's own name using this silly WP-SVBTLE theme says way more about the author of the blog than it does about Svbtle.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    >A willingness to publish under one's own name using this silly WP-SVBTLE theme says way more about the author of the blog The Atlantic theme looks like a fairly generic news website, to be honest. That said, wow. You are reading a lot of personal bias into choice of website theme. I was planning on grabbing this for my personal one just because I really, really like how it looks. If it's going to tick off people who over-extrapolate, so much the better ;)
    - tptacek 14y ago
      I think it's a very bad idea to use this theme for your personal blog, regardless of what you think of Svbtle. But if you want your choice of blog theme to compete for attention with your ideas, that's your call.

xianshou 14y ago

The problem is not under-usage per se, but hype. Caldwell's soapboxing about Twitter's failure to live up to its potential raised expectations, but didn't provide a solution to the chicken-egg problem. I'm sure Caldwell & co can build a great API and app platform, but that all becomes relevant and compelling only once App.net can grow a community a respectable fraction (1%?) of Twitter's size. Of course, as noted elsewhere, it's too early to pass judgment - but it's also a good reminder that unless you like throwing around $50s (http://ihave50dollars.com/ http://ihave50dollars.com/), App.net won't matter to you for a good while yet.

scott_to_s 14y ago

Apart from the fact that it's extremely early days for App.net right now, this article assumes that Twitter will remain as it is now, and not deteriorate further with significantly increased levels of advertising and spam. App.net will likely become increasingly attractive as Twitter becomes more "manipulated" to deliver on those promised eyeballs. I've paid up for App.net because I have a zero tolerance policy to advertising, and I don't want to be involved with services that have their primary business model built around marketing and advertising. In this case App.net is not aping Twitter, because Twitter will never indulge the idea of a world without advertising.

jyap 14y ago
You also do not read magazines, newspapers or watch television? You also do not use Google or Twitter (this isn't you? https://twitter.com/scott_to_s https://twitter.com/scott_to_s)?
- scott_to_s 14y ago
  Yes, that's me. And no, I don't watch terrestrial TV, or read magazines. Yes, I use Twitter now, but I'd like to move away from it, especially if it continues to move in the direction that it's going... hence my subscription to App.net and my comment that you're responding to. The fact that I have a Twitter account means that it is curretly useful for me, but it doesn't change my stance on advertising, which I do not tolerate. I also use Twitter via a client that does not pollute my stream with advertising, but this cannot last. I'm quite happy to pay for a service that doesn't advertise or sell eyeballs.

jaseemabid 14y ago

twitter irritates the least with ads. The same thing for linkedin or facebook would have been a lot better. Wait.. where is diaspora?

RandallBrown 14y ago

>For an end user, App.net looks exactly like Twitter and it won’t improve their experience in any relevant way that will make them want to switch. The whole point of App.net is to be an API for other apps to be built on. The "Alpha" app or whatever is a twitter clone, but that doesn't mean that every app built on it will be.

jjacobson 14y ago

I'm glad Tim Berners Lee built a protocol instead of a platform.

salman89 14y ago

OP is missing the point. I don't think App.net is going out to be a Twitter replacement. I don't think App.net requires the critical mass or wide spread popularity that Twitter enjoys. Its a niche product that is serving a very particular purpose. I wish that some blogger or journalist would try to evaluate App.net on what its setting out to be, not comparing it to Twitter. At the end of the day, App.net will be a paid service. It's not fair to compare it to Twitter. There is some overlap, but for the most part this is a different market segment.

eurleif 14y ago
I must have missed something. What is the very particular purpose that app.net serves? What is it supposed to be used for?

kyt 14y ago

All social networks suffer from 90/10 rule (90% of the content is generated by 10% of the users), so this really isn't surprising. Other posters have mentioned this as well, but I think Twitter has too much momentum. Someone trying to do the exact same thing from the end-user perspective isn't going to be able to compete.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

In my mind, app.net is incredibly interesting, but not because it is like Twitter. If app.net is going to be successful, it is going to be because they become very not-like-twitter, by becoming critical infrastructure that applications can easily talk together with. In my mind, app.net's competitor isn't Twitter, it's HTTP.

gauravsc 14y ago

Why are you finding problems with app.net instead of focussing on it;s good parts and possibilities. You say and talk about some fundamental differences with companies facebook and apple, but why should anyone believe your assessment. Future can not be predicted in the world of technology and app.net has a good chance like any other company.

andrewhillman 14y ago

I am not a paid supporter of app.net nor have I seen what they have built to date but I'd put money on app.net evolving into something different than what it is today. For those of you who paid into supporting app.net, I think you paid into the people behind app.net and not app.net itself. Give them time to flesh things out before you critique.

goggles99 14y ago

Yeah, I guess the NFL season has started - here comes the Arm Chair quarterbacks. What did you expect from App.net. I think you are suffering from setting your expectations too high. It is designed to fill a niche - and it actually has a more sustainable financial outlook than Twitter.