7 ms·

The Great App.net Mistake

120 points by sylvinus 13y ago

mmuro 13y ago
In other words, normal people that use Twitter or Instagram still have no clue what App.net is and the early adopters of App.net will eventually get tired of it.
- neuroscr 13y ago
  Early adopters aren't tired yet because App.net's continually releasing interesting updates to the platform. And there's even a great example of 3rd party developers working together on their system to extend and support one 3rd party developer's chat system (patter). So each developer's project help retainer interest as well. So as long as App.net keeps releasing new APIs and developers stay interested in the platform. I don't think early adopters will get tired.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
TruthSHIFT 13y ago
I read the whole article and never discovered the mistake. Did I miss something? It sounds like app.net is doing fine.
- zalew 13y ago
  "Alpha was the first product out of the gate, launched in reaction to something Twitter did. Subsequently, much development was in building Twitter-like things. So its little wonder that people associate App.net with, well, Twitter. And once people form an idea of what a product is, it becomes very hard to change that idea. "
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    To be more explicit, the mistake is on the part of the people with the wrong idea of what App.net is. At least that's how I took it.
    - recursive 13y ago
      Why is the idea that app.net is a paid version of twitter so pervasive? That's what I thought until today. Perhaps it's my fault for being wrong, but if that particular mistake is so widespread, perhaps app.net is also making a mistake by not addressing it harder.
      - aaronbrethorst 13y ago
        Why is the idea that app.net is a paid version of twitter so pervasive? Because this is exactly what it was laid out to be when it was first announced. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/app-net-reaches-its-500k-funding-goal-with-38-hours-to-spare/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/app-net-reaches-its-500k-fu...
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    It is like Twitter, except it's like Twitter circa 2008/2009. It is what (many of) the early Twitter users though Twitter was and what they wanted it to become. The problem is that 1) Most people weren't around during those times. 2) Those who were have either forgotten what it was like or have come to terms with what Twitter is now.
  - pavedwalden 13y ago
    That is a shame. 90% of the criticisms I've seen of App.net were mocking it for being 'an open source twitter' and completely ignored its ambitions to encompass general social network features.
    - johns 13y ago
      Or that it's not open source.
      - cbhl 13y ago
        It's not like there aren't F/OSS Twitter clones... just look at StatusNet. Or Pump.io, which (AFAICT) is a Facebook/Google+/Diaspora clone.
      - neuroscr 13y ago
        Are open standards not important? Just the source? They have been starting to release the source code of the client applications they've built: https://github.com/appdotnet/ https://github.com/appdotnet/
  - AznHisoka 13y ago
    They wanted to build an open, paid version of the Twitter API/ecosystem. But the value of the Twitter API lay in the access to their 100 million+ users, and all the valuable social data generated by those 100 million+ users. No amount of "open infrastructure", no matter how clever can ever replace that. It's like buying 1000 data centers in every country, and building an entire system that can handle a billion concurrent users, and saying "Yeah, we can take on Facebook with this", then realize the hard part was getting users, not scaling the infrastructure.
    - fusiongyro 13y ago
      Why do I have to read this comment every time App.net gets brought up? Is every conversation about App.net doomed to turn into a debate about whether it will succeed, and if not why?
      - corin_ 13y ago
        In a discussion about an article written about whether App.net will succeed, that seems like a pretty logical thing to be talking about, no? It's not like he hijacked something completely unrelated and changed the topic.
        fusiongyro 13y ago
        I suppose that's fair, but I still find this line of thought tiresome. At least the article is arguing that App.net's problem is that it's too much like Twitter when it could be used for more, rather than the usual tired argument that Twitter's success is simply network effects, therefore App.net cannot succeed. After all, as a business, App.net is already a success; it doesn't need runaway growth to be sustained.
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      It's not open. It's closed, proprietary and the boys over at Andressen-Horowitz are going to want a return on their investment.
      - 13y ago
  - neuroscr 13y ago
    It was a big mistake. Clinging on to the twitter model gave them something tangible to model after and improve on but the result of that is the API is largely for micro-blogging. They have some file storage now but the primitives for a broad web application building platform aren't there yet. So from reading the API from a developers point of view, it's obvious that it's for micro-blogging. It takes a lot of imagination and effort to repurpose their API into something new.
ohazi 13y ago
From the beginning I've quietly predicted that if App.net is ever going to succeed, they will eventually end up going with a more traditional business model where they charge developers for the capacity their applications use (in my mind, they would end up resembling Firebase). Dalton will write up some charismatic blog post about why this is the right move, and how it was really part of the plan all along. Some people will eat it up; others will call bullshit; and the world will keep turning.
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  Then 4 years later, he'll write a blog post on why selling the company to Twitter/Google/Facebook will be the best move. And how burnt out he is, and how he's leaving to pursue "other dreams". And people will congratulate him.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Why does this sound so familiar?
- wmf 13y ago
  Good point. In the last App.net thread I said they'll probably need a killer app to get people to sign up. But if people are mostly in it for one app, why should that app settle for a slice of referral revenue? More likely the killer app would prefer to own the customer billing relationship and send a slice of revenue to App.net. I don't see why we should criticize them too much if they change business models, though. If this was so easy that you could get it right on the first try, it would have been done already.
ewest 13y ago
The "mistake" is at the end... 'There are no breakout apps. There is no WhatsApp or DrawSomething. App.net remains a plaything for developers...' ...it certainly took them long enough to get to it.
itafroma 13y ago
Mat Honan deserves credit for one of the clearest, most concise descriptions of what App.net is (or intends to be): > Imagine this. You sign up for Vine, and build up a robust friend network and library of videos. But then you try out Instagram’s new video sharing, and decide you like its editing features a lot better. > Normally, this would mean starting over, with no friends and no files. But let’s say that both of them were just applications that ran on top of App.net. Instead of starting over, when you fired up Instagram for the first time, your friends and videos would be there waiting for you. That’s App.net. Or at least that’s what it wants to be. Up until I read those two paragraphs, I couldn't shake the notion that it was really a Twitter clone that didn't want to be pigeonholed. Now I get it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mbesto 13y ago
  Huh? I'm actually more confused. Doesn't Facebook-connect (and FB apps in general) effectively give you the ability to buy/rent their network effect already? Thus eliminating the "no friends and no files" notion?
  - benaiah 13y ago
    Yes, but neither Twitter and Facebook are in the "social provider" business - they're in the ad business. This is why they've had so much friction with their 3rd-party developer ecosystem. Dalton wants App.net to be a social utility - providing ownership of social data to the user for a price. There are no ads, so there's no motivation to screw over developers. That's the idea, at least.
  - terhechte 13y ago
    Facebook is picky about which app is allowed to use your data. Twitter, for example, is not allowed to use it anymore. So when you develop an app, just relying on facebook could lead to a situation where you suddenly don't have access to your friends anymore (from within that app). Most apps also have their own user databases and just use facebook data for import. With app.net that's the one point where your user data would be saved.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lalc 13y ago
I get that App.net is supposed about owning your own data, and sure there's a brief mention of PRISM at the top. But why I would want to write an app for it in the era of PRISM? How can I trust this notion of a "private cloud?" What I'm looking for now is more decentralization and encryption than a walled garden.
dangero 13y ago
I'll give App.net one thing: They get more press on HN than any other irrelevant company in the world.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  They have funding. Journalists like free lunches.
  - rdl 13y ago
    I think it's more that they have lower odds of success (at their current mission) than most startups, but if they're successful, a bigger impact. And fundamentally it's meta, so more interesting than any given startup -- there's more of a philosophical argument behind it than just a better designed chat client or whatever.
- neuroscr 13y ago
  Well, I think they captured some imaginations, to the point where they were told it's impossible. So it's an interesting experiment. Especially since they've been success and on-target to deliver most of their promises so far. It's a huge risk, that not many investors would take. The financial returns are questionable, but what it could do for the Internet as a platform is disrupt the current mega social providers and IMHO I think that's worth trying.
alan_cx 13y ago
I wonder if a part of these site or services is how the name works in the language. I can "tweet" something I can "google" something, but "app" something? Not saying its crucial or 100% important, but I do think the name and it's ability to work well in English has a lot to d owith success. Maybe?
- roryokane 13y ago
  The name is not a problem. You can “tweet” and “google” something because tweeting and googling use products. App.net is not a product, it is a platform. Similarly, you can’t “facebook” something, you can only “post on Facebook”, but that’s okay because Facebook is a platform.
Camillo 13y ago
If people don't want their social network to be at the whims of a company, why not go all the way and adopt the Tent protocol? http://tent.io http://tent.io I mean, I can see why from a developer's point of view. Those $30k a month are enticing. But why would users care?
- wmf 13y ago
  Devil's advocate: Maybe that $30K can pay for good UX which users definitely care about.
  - neuroscr 13y ago
    Funny you should mention that. I feel that crowd-sourcing user interface development by given an open access to an API will lead to new experiments with UI/UX. I believe when Twitter was more open, we saw an explosion of clients and UI/UX. A couple of these innovations we hadn't easily seen before. One of the hopes is that the App.net platform continues this experiment.
- neuroscr 13y ago
  Users care because it's easier to pay $5/mo, than to set up and maintain your own infrastructure. Especially if you don't have any experience with servers (Think Grandma, Mom, Dad, non-techies etc).
  - danielsiders 13y ago
    Tent works like email-- some users run their own servers, but most sign up for a service that handles it for them (like https://tent.is https://tent.is)
reedlaw 13y ago
While I appreciate Dalton's insight into incentivizing good behavior by treating a social network as infrastructure rather than an advertising/media business, I can't help but feel he's simply asking people to trust App.net because this time it's really different. What would prevent App.net from pulling a Twitter? Or from PRISM'ing our data? App.net seems like an incrementalist approach to a problem that requires more of a revolution. I wish there was something else with even half the traction of App.net if only it provided a distributed social network with no central point of failure and a solid API to build from.
damian2000 13y ago
Say what you want about it, but to class it as a mistake is wrong in my opinion. Back when Twitter was getting a lot of bad press from developers, the founder saw a market niche and successfully got backing from lots of people in that niche ... Enough devs were willing to stump up $50 to get something like the Twitter API without limits (or the client side ads).
tullio 13y ago
>That’s where the new narrative of ADN as Twitter for elitists took hold, especially because its users were decidedly male and white, and because it launched just as industry critics were starting to launch attacks on the white male dominated world of new social services. Oh no, those evil white men are at it again, always innovating and inventing new cool stuff! Fucking racist and sexist hypocrites.

120 points by sylvinus 13y ago

mmuro 13y ago

In other words, normal people that use Twitter or Instagram still have no clue what App.net is and the early adopters of App.net will eventually get tired of it.

neuroscr 13y ago
Early adopters aren't tired yet because App.net's continually releasing interesting updates to the platform. And there's even a great example of 3rd party developers working together on their system to extend and support one 3rd party developer's chat system (patter). So each developer's project help retainer interest as well. So as long as App.net keeps releasing new APIs and developers stay interested in the platform. I don't think early adopters will get tired.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

TruthSHIFT 13y ago

I read the whole article and never discovered the mistake. Did I miss something? It sounds like app.net is doing fine.

zalew 13y ago
"Alpha was the first product out of the gate, launched in reaction to something Twitter did. Subsequently, much development was in building Twitter-like things. So its little wonder that people associate App.net with, well, Twitter. And once people form an idea of what a product is, it becomes very hard to change that idea. "
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  To be more explicit, the mistake is on the part of the people with the wrong idea of what App.net is. At least that's how I took it.
  - recursive 13y ago
    Why is the idea that app.net is a paid version of twitter so pervasive? That's what I thought until today. Perhaps it's my fault for being wrong, but if that particular mistake is so widespread, perhaps app.net is also making a mistake by not addressing it harder.
    - aaronbrethorst 13y ago
      Why is the idea that app.net is a paid version of twitter so pervasive? Because this is exactly what it was laid out to be when it was first announced. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/app-net-reaches-its-500k-funding-goal-with-38-hours-to-spare/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/app-net-reaches-its-500k-fu...
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  It is like Twitter, except it's like Twitter circa 2008/2009. It is what (many of) the early Twitter users though Twitter was and what they wanted it to become. The problem is that 1) Most people weren't around during those times. 2) Those who were have either forgotten what it was like or have come to terms with what Twitter is now.
- pavedwalden 13y ago
  That is a shame. 90% of the criticisms I've seen of App.net were mocking it for being 'an open source twitter' and completely ignored its ambitions to encompass general social network features.
  - johns 13y ago
    Or that it's not open source.
    - cbhl 13y ago
      It's not like there aren't F/OSS Twitter clones... just look at StatusNet. Or Pump.io, which (AFAICT) is a Facebook/Google+/Diaspora clone.
    - neuroscr 13y ago
      Are open standards not important? Just the source? They have been starting to release the source code of the client applications they've built: https://github.com/appdotnet/ https://github.com/appdotnet/
- AznHisoka 13y ago
  They wanted to build an open, paid version of the Twitter API/ecosystem. But the value of the Twitter API lay in the access to their 100 million+ users, and all the valuable social data generated by those 100 million+ users. No amount of "open infrastructure", no matter how clever can ever replace that. It's like buying 1000 data centers in every country, and building an entire system that can handle a billion concurrent users, and saying "Yeah, we can take on Facebook with this", then realize the hard part was getting users, not scaling the infrastructure.
  - fusiongyro 13y ago
    Why do I have to read this comment every time App.net gets brought up? Is every conversation about App.net doomed to turn into a debate about whether it will succeed, and if not why?
    - corin_ 13y ago
      In a discussion about an article written about whether App.net will succeed, that seems like a pretty logical thing to be talking about, no? It's not like he hijacked something completely unrelated and changed the topic.
      - fusiongyro 13y ago
        I suppose that's fair, but I still find this line of thought tiresome. At least the article is arguing that App.net's problem is that it's too much like Twitter when it could be used for more, rather than the usual tired argument that Twitter's success is simply network effects, therefore App.net cannot succeed. After all, as a business, App.net is already a success; it doesn't need runaway growth to be sustained.
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    It's not open. It's closed, proprietary and the boys over at Andressen-Horowitz are going to want a return on their investment.
    - 13y ago
- neuroscr 13y ago
  It was a big mistake. Clinging on to the twitter model gave them something tangible to model after and improve on but the result of that is the API is largely for micro-blogging. They have some file storage now but the primitives for a broad web application building platform aren't there yet. So from reading the API from a developers point of view, it's obvious that it's for micro-blogging. It takes a lot of imagination and effort to repurpose their API into something new.

ohazi 13y ago

From the beginning I've quietly predicted that if App.net is ever going to succeed, they will eventually end up going with a more traditional business model where they charge developers for the capacity their applications use (in my mind, they would end up resembling Firebase). Dalton will write up some charismatic blog post about why this is the right move, and how it was really part of the plan all along. Some people will eat it up; others will call bullshit; and the world will keep turning.

AznHisoka 13y ago
Then 4 years later, he'll write a blog post on why selling the company to Twitter/Google/Facebook will be the best move. And how burnt out he is, and how he's leaving to pursue "other dreams". And people will congratulate him.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Why does this sound so familiar?
wmf 13y ago
Good point. In the last App.net thread I said they'll probably need a killer app to get people to sign up. But if people are mostly in it for one app, why should that app settle for a slice of referral revenue? More likely the killer app would prefer to own the customer billing relationship and send a slice of revenue to App.net. I don't see why we should criticize them too much if they change business models, though. If this was so easy that you could get it right on the first try, it would have been done already.

ewest 13y ago

The "mistake" is at the end... 'There are no breakout apps. There is no WhatsApp or DrawSomething. App.net remains a plaything for developers...' ...it certainly took them long enough to get to it.

itafroma 13y ago

Mat Honan deserves credit for one of the clearest, most concise descriptions of what App.net is (or intends to be): > Imagine this. You sign up for Vine, and build up a robust friend network and library of videos. But then you try out Instagram’s new video sharing, and decide you like its editing features a lot better. > Normally, this would mean starting over, with no friends and no files. But let’s say that both of them were just applications that ran on top of App.net. Instead of starting over, when you fired up Instagram for the first time, your friends and videos would be there waiting for you. That’s App.net. Or at least that’s what it wants to be. Up until I read those two paragraphs, I couldn't shake the notion that it was really a Twitter clone that didn't want to be pigeonholed. Now I get it.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mbesto 13y ago
Huh? I'm actually more confused. Doesn't Facebook-connect (and FB apps in general) effectively give you the ability to buy/rent their network effect already? Thus eliminating the "no friends and no files" notion?
- benaiah 13y ago
  Yes, but neither Twitter and Facebook are in the "social provider" business - they're in the ad business. This is why they've had so much friction with their 3rd-party developer ecosystem. Dalton wants App.net to be a social utility - providing ownership of social data to the user for a price. There are no ads, so there's no motivation to screw over developers. That's the idea, at least.
- terhechte 13y ago
  Facebook is picky about which app is allowed to use your data. Twitter, for example, is not allowed to use it anymore. So when you develop an app, just relying on facebook could lead to a situation where you suddenly don't have access to your friends anymore (from within that app). Most apps also have their own user databases and just use facebook data for import. With app.net that's the one point where your user data would be saved.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

lalc 13y ago

I get that App.net is supposed about owning your own data, and sure there's a brief mention of PRISM at the top. But why I would want to write an app for it in the era of PRISM? How can I trust this notion of a "private cloud?" What I'm looking for now is more decentralization and encryption than a walled garden.

dangero 13y ago

I'll give App.net one thing: They get more press on HN than any other irrelevant company in the world.

yapcguy 13y ago
They have funding. Journalists like free lunches.
- rdl 13y ago
  I think it's more that they have lower odds of success (at their current mission) than most startups, but if they're successful, a bigger impact. And fundamentally it's meta, so more interesting than any given startup -- there's more of a philosophical argument behind it than just a better designed chat client or whatever.
neuroscr 13y ago
Well, I think they captured some imaginations, to the point where they were told it's impossible. So it's an interesting experiment. Especially since they've been success and on-target to deliver most of their promises so far. It's a huge risk, that not many investors would take. The financial returns are questionable, but what it could do for the Internet as a platform is disrupt the current mega social providers and IMHO I think that's worth trying.

alan_cx 13y ago

I wonder if a part of these site or services is how the name works in the language. I can "tweet" something I can "google" something, but "app" something? Not saying its crucial or 100% important, but I do think the name and it's ability to work well in English has a lot to d owith success. Maybe?

roryokane 13y ago
The name is not a problem. You can “tweet” and “google” something because tweeting and googling use products. App.net is not a product, it is a platform. Similarly, you can’t “facebook” something, you can only “post on Facebook”, but that’s okay because Facebook is a platform.

Camillo 13y ago

If people don't want their social network to be at the whims of a company, why not go all the way and adopt the Tent protocol? http://tent.io http://tent.io I mean, I can see why from a developer's point of view. Those $30k a month are enticing. But why would users care?

wmf 13y ago
Devil's advocate: Maybe that $30K can pay for good UX which users definitely care about.
- neuroscr 13y ago
  Funny you should mention that. I feel that crowd-sourcing user interface development by given an open access to an API will lead to new experiments with UI/UX. I believe when Twitter was more open, we saw an explosion of clients and UI/UX. A couple of these innovations we hadn't easily seen before. One of the hopes is that the App.net platform continues this experiment.
neuroscr 13y ago
Users care because it's easier to pay $5/mo, than to set up and maintain your own infrastructure. Especially if you don't have any experience with servers (Think Grandma, Mom, Dad, non-techies etc).
- danielsiders 13y ago
  Tent works like email-- some users run their own servers, but most sign up for a service that handles it for them (like https://tent.is https://tent.is)

reedlaw 13y ago

While I appreciate Dalton's insight into incentivizing good behavior by treating a social network as infrastructure rather than an advertising/media business, I can't help but feel he's simply asking people to trust App.net because this time it's really different. What would prevent App.net from pulling a Twitter? Or from PRISM'ing our data? App.net seems like an incrementalist approach to a problem that requires more of a revolution. I wish there was something else with even half the traction of App.net if only it provided a distributed social network with no central point of failure and a solid API to build from.

damian2000 13y ago

Say what you want about it, but to class it as a mistake is wrong in my opinion. Back when Twitter was getting a lot of bad press from developers, the founder saw a market niche and successfully got backing from lots of people in that niche ... Enough devs were willing to stump up $50 to get something like the Twitter API without limits (or the client side ads).

tullio 13y ago

>That’s where the new narrative of ADN as Twitter for elitists took hold, especially because its users were decidedly male and white, and because it launched just as industry critics were starting to launch attacks on the white male dominated world of new social services. Oh no, those evil white men are at it again, always innovating and inventing new cool stuff! Fucking racist and sexist hypocrites.