10 ms·

App.net State of the Union

199 points by mergy 12y ago

robot 12y ago
I think there is a simple reason why app.net did not take off: There was no significant differentiation from twitter other than paid / no ads argument.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eddyg 12y ago
  However the 256-character limit in the micro-blogging service and its support for embedded links (so you didn't need to use ugly URL shorteners that hid what you were about to click-through to) and images (which did not require yet another visible URL) are very nice features.
- rossk 12y ago
  Half true: alpha is the Twitter clone, but in theory, that's just one app of many built on the API. The many just never happened.
  - jmathai 12y ago
    You could almost say the same thing about Twitter. Their web and mobile apps are just one of many apps built on their API.
    - dasil003 12y ago
      Indeed many people including Dalton were saying that from 2007-2011ish when the Twitter API was wide open and speculation about it's potential as plumbing ran rampant. However over the last few years, it became increasing clear that the contingent of people inside Twitter who saw it as new and amazing plumbing for the next generation of applications were losing, and the contingent who saw Twitter as a media company selling advertising with a fully controller and branded user experience were the ones who won out. Anyone building an app on top of Twitter for anything other than personal or experimental use is a fool. Unfortunately for anyone building on top of App.net, it doesn't have the users to make it broadly interesting or significantly profitable.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
X-Istence 12y ago
I didn't renew my App.net subscription, there really was no value for me. Checking it along with Twitter got tiresome (I was hoping someone would integrate the two into a single client) and overall everyone I care to follow is on Twitter, it was difficult to get people interested and on the App.net bandwagon.
- eridius 12y ago
  > I was hoping someone would integrate the two into a single client My belief is that Twitter's rules prohibited doing precisely that. There are multiple developers that expressed an interest in creating a single app for viewing both, but never did so because Twitter would have revoked their API token.
unreal37 12y ago
Talk about a buried lede. They are profitable as long as they don't pay anyone a salary. That hardly counts as profitable. How can the service grow?
- dinkumthinkum 12y ago
  That's what I was thinking. That's an extremely disingenuous thing to say. This is especially since, apparently, many "renewals" were just auto-renewals and does not indicate any kind of traction.
- sp332 12y ago
  They still have contractors working on new features.
- ry0ohki 12y ago
  When I was bootstrapping my startup while working a day job, I used to wonder how to answer that question. My product was bringing in more money then the company's costs, so it felt "profitable", yet not enough to employ me full-time. Seems like there is a difference between that and something that is just plain unprofitable (where the burn rate will eventually cause the bank account to go to zero).
  - superqd 12y ago
    The software doesn't write and maintain itself. So if the revenue can't cover the expense to write/maintain the codebase (i.e., dev salaries), then the app isn't profitable because one of the major costs can't be met out of revenue at 100%.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  Gross profit vs net profit If you make money after non-employee costs, then scaling up X times will eventually be enough to cover costs -- especially with a software product where you don't need 10x more developers to earn 10x more money
joewee 12y ago
I signed up for app.net when it first offered the paid option and was billed for the renewal, but honestly I haven't touched the site in a year. I just forgot to cancel my subscription. I really want to support it but I have no reason to engage with it. I'm willing to support the company, so I can't understand why they don't pivot to something people are happy to pay for? I might even pay for a light social media dashboard. No reason to wind down in my opinion...
- jmathai 12y ago
  Not enough people willing to pay to pivot to something people are (possibly) happy to pay for. That's what App.net was. It had good signs of support at the start and they dove in head first -- I think a wise decision. The odds were against them; as they are with all startups. This just happens to be their day of reckoning.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mcone 12y ago
"The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees." Did these guys burn through over $3 million in less than a year? They got $2.5 million in August 2013. (http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/14/app-net-new-funding/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/14/app-net-new-funding/)
- pcl 12y ago
  Interesting. The $2.5M that mcone mentioned was venture from Andreeson Horowitz, not subscription revenue. Also, according to CrunchBase [1], their parent company has raised $7M total. I wonder if this announcement means that the parent company is shutting down, or the employees of that company are no longer working on App.net in a full-time capacity. [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mixed-media-labs http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mixed-media-labs
  - neuroscr 12y ago
    The parent company is still there. It pretty much means, they're pivoting with all the money they raised.
    - neuroscr 12y ago
      I can confirm they did lay-off most of their staff though.
jaredcwhite 12y ago
It's frustrating news because the platform never actually got to the point where it could be used as back-end infrastructure in the manner of something like, say, Stripe. In other words, I couldn't built a website where users simply sign up/in, use the service, share content, etc., and not really be aware they're using App.net under the hood. I think App.net shot itself in the foot by being implemented more or less as a Twitter clone to start with. That meant that there was constantly a branding problem -- user wonders "Why am I on Website X and they're asking me to create an App.net account...what's that?!?!" We still need a ubiquitous social/identity/billing platform that undergirds the web, yet can be used seamlessly by devs of any particular site without exposing the guts of said service. I'm waiting for someone to actually build that...waiting...waiting...
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  Not trying to be snarky, but isn't this "email"?
  - pcl 12y ago
    I'd say "no", since existing email clients don't lend themselves to custom per-message user experiences.
    - hagbardgroup 12y ago
      Couldn't better email clients and e-mail services be made that do? I'm trying to look at this from an idiot's perspective (which may not be all that far from my ordinary perspective, because I don't know a huge amount of detail about how email works).
      - pcl 12y ago
        Theoretically, but that's not part of the model today. And if you're going to innovate on that, it's unclear that you'd want to do it on top of SMTP as a transport, rather than something newer. SMTP itself provides very little in the way of assurances about identity, deliverability, etc., all of which you'd care about as you build something higher-level. The closest thing to innovation in this space that I know of is the stuff that Gmail is doing with custom actions [1] and contextual gadgets. And even there, they are parsing the HTML-ish body of the email to trigger the behavior, which is pretty far away from the SMTP layer itself. [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions-overview https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions-...
programminggeek 12y ago
This is one more indictment to the idea that you can build a profitable business on consumer apps without just slapping on ads and then the revenues are so low per user that unless you have millions of users, it's probably not going to support much of a business.
- beaumartinez 12y ago
  The problem with App.net was that it offered nothing new. It was an alternative to existing free, established products—Twitter (and, to an extent, Google+ and Facebook).
davidu 12y ago
They renewed me without any reminder. I had forgotten about the service. That's irksome. And I'm willing to bet a VERY LARGE number of the renewals were people just like me. There is no business there, and worse, they auto-renewed people without a single reminder it was coming.
- zwily 12y ago
  Same here. I wonder how many cancellations they get today.
- dannyr 12y ago
  Happened to me too. I emailed them and gave me a refund.
- mattlong 12y ago
  Eeek, that's a bit slimy. The only reason I didn't get auto-renewed is that my credit card had expired.
  - aculver 12y ago
    Hey Matt, just to clarify, the reason you didn't get auto-renewed probably has more to do with the fact that they're billing annually combined with the fact that your credit card had expired. When billing monthly, about 4 out of 5 credit cards that are expired will just keep approving transactions that are recurring. You may already be aware of this, but I mention it because it's a pretty common mistake to assume that expired cards will result in failed payments across the board, so if you didn't already know you may want to double check that there aren't other services you're not still paying for. ;-)
    - sp332 12y ago
      Not to mention, you still legally owe the service money even if your credit card isn't working. Many companies will automatically cancel your service, but if they don't, you're on the hook (since you did order the service).
moot 12y ago
I found myself in the same exact position with Canvas/DrawQuest earlier this year. Everyone (including myself) was laid off a few months ago, but we'd hoped to keep the app running with the remaining revenue/cash-on-hand and volunteered time (cut short by a recent hack). It sucks, but I think we'll see more of it in the coming months/year. A lot of the seed-funded apps/companies from the past few years simply won't represent later-stage venture opportunities, and may find themselves in a position where they can't raise additional capital but can keep the service afloat without the payroll overhead.
- diggan 12y ago
  Kind of off topic but what keeps you from open sourcing it and hosting with some provider that loves be showed in the light of open source?
  - andreasklinger 12y ago
    We were in a similar situation and considered it. There is quite a trail of minor problems: Eg. Legal implications with investors/shareholders/etc (Unlikely but) Potential security issues Fixing the code to a level that other people can run it Documenting the code to a level that other people understand how to run it (eg dependencies on services around it) And i am pretty sure there are many more. All solvable problems but in most cases come in a moment when a founder has already ran too far and is out of cash/time/energy to tackle those.
  - criley2 12y ago
    When people say "why not open source it", I begin to question something: - Are you saying, "why not pay yourself to spend many hours working your codebase into something that can be, at a minimum, copied down and installed successfully on hardware that you don't control" that doesn't violate any IP and only includes code you are legally permitted to open source - Or are you saying: "Just open up the repo as-is and see what happens!" It seems the latter option (just dump everything) is the only feasible option for a business who cannot afford additional development, but is probably immoral and illegal (you likely don't have all the rights to ALL of the code). The first option sounds great but if moot doesn't have money in the business to pay himself to do all of that work... are you suggesting he just volunteer a large amount of his personal time to do a bunch of free work for a failing business? I can understand why a developer would prefer to get paid for their effort (and the type of developer who wishes to work for free, by default, wouldn't be in this position and would have open sourced the project from the get go...)
jaxomlotus 12y ago
It was a really hard business model to support and get to work. You are paying for the forward belief that the network itself will be strong enough to ultimately justify the costs, but over time if that belief isn't met (and it wasn't) then you will lose subscribers. I give Dalton and Brian kudos for trying. Ultimately I think the lesson here is users simply aren't offended enough by ads that they would be willing to pay a subscription service to avoid them.
- auxbuss 12y ago
  I believe that users are sufficiently offended by ads to pay to avoid them, but clearly and provably not the price that app.net charged. I believe there's more to it than that, but the price being too high was a major contributor.
  - jkrems 12y ago
    I'm not even sure the dollar price was the issue. But I would have to rebuild things like "people to follow", get used to the new interface, have the risk that the platform doesn't survive - a lot of implicit costs. What could be working is to offer a paid tier for an already existing service like Twitter - but unfortunately they have a strong incentive not to. Because it would mean that their ads would stop reaching the very people that the advertisers are interested in - the ones who are willing to spend money.
moeedm 12y ago
I give it 6 months.
mantrax5 12y ago
Remember rev="canonical"? It was to save us from the tyranny of bit.ly and co. Geeks rallied behind it. Remember Open ID? It was to save us from the tyranny of Passport.NET and co. Geeks rallied behind it. Remember Diaspora? It was to save us from the tyranny of Facebook. Geeks rallied behind it. Remember App.net...? The history of geeky "open" (or ad-free or whatever) alternatives to commercial social media services is littered with corpses. What geeks never learn is that social media services can't survive if the only appeal of the service is some righteous motivation that only they care about. Sooner or later even geeks realize that using a "better" service to talk to nobody isn't very useful. I know it seems easy to be Captain Obvious now that App.net is falling apart, but just you watch. Soon enough it'll happen again (and then again, and again).
- filmgirlcw 12y ago
  And before App.net, there was Identi.ca. What is disappointing about App.net was that it had the potential to be a set of pipes and a broader infrastructure rather than being simply yet another social network. And that's what my true hope for App.net was.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    Marketing is a huge part of the success of a new paradigm. App.net was "marketed" with a practically blank home page ("one login many applications" - which applications?), and a nondescript niche Twitter clone on one of its subdomains. It had no chance at all. Where was the evangelism? Where were the presentations, demos, and the other useful apps built on this platform? I'm a developer and I did hear about App.net when the buzz was at its peak. I remember going to their home page and wondering "wtf is this?", then checking alpha.app.net on a couple of occasions, finding nothing of interest and that's it. That wonderful arrogance that the world will care about your project because you're somehow "right" has killed many tech efforts and will kill a lot to come yet.
    - filmgirlcw 12y ago
      Those are really good points. I think part of the problem was the initial strategy that required all accounts to be paid limited the userbase to the point that it wasn't worth experimenting with. I don't know how you get around that challenge of building a mass userbase, keeping the framework open and yet still being sustainable. But that's a separate challenge from what you described.
jimmytidey 12y ago
For me pieces of infrastructure like Twitter shouldn't be owned by for profit companies. A Twitter-like public forum ought to be the town square of the web, and it should run along the same lines as Wikipedia. The data should be ours to do as we please with, there should be no purchasing access through adverts. App.net, and the insanely confusing concept of the Alpha app within it, might not have been the right solution, but they were asking the right question.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  We need protocols, not platforms. Unfortunately, it's 2014, and protocols are not sexy.
  - drpancake 12y ago
    Unless you count the wave of innovation coming out of cryptocurrencies, which are really just protocols for managing a blockchain. A decentralised Twitter could theoretically be built with this model.
    - __david__ 12y ago
      Isn't a decentralized twitter just email?
      - fzltrp 12y ago
        ...With the exception that everyone can read every emails (or is there a private tweet feature with twitter?).
  - riffic 12y ago
    http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
- pjc50 12y ago
  The only question is "who pays for the infrastructure". Wikipedia has done extremely well with its donation drives; that's very hard to repeat. App.net seems to have struggled to make users pay directly. Arguably the whatsapp charging model has worked best.
jusben1369 12y ago
I'm always think "rage" startups are the most risky. App.net was based on a super small but vocal group that hated advertising in their social apps. Dwolla is a payments based rage sort of startup born from a founder who hated paying 3% of his money to credit card fees. A very small, passionate, group can convince each other that there must be enough people like them or even similar enough to dramatically change their behavior (create a whole new payment flow, try and get important and interesting information through a new source) The problem is after that 5% of passionate users you just fall off a cliff in terms of how much effort then next 5% and ultimately 95% will do.
- snide 12y ago
  Agreed. Though it's easier to spot in retrospect. Crowds on the Internet can look larger than they seem.
  - untog 12y ago
    It was kind of easy to spot at the time. App.net never really felt like it took off.
- pinaceae 12y ago
  same with https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ i guess.
  - lmm 12y ago
    The problem there is that it's too hard to get an account. How would I know someone who has one?
- noblethrasher 12y ago
  In other words, your customers’ passion should be fire rather than fuel.
- tomasien 12y ago
  If you think the 3% in CC fees is something felt by a small number of businesses you're so, so very wrong. Dwolla is actually doing quite well despite the fact that it's insanely hard to pay with Dwolla if you don't have an account - that's how much businesses hate the fees. They push it anyway. Programmers making SaaS products often don't understand but that 3% is often 30% to as much as 90% of a businesses margin.
SmileyKeith 12y ago
As a developer on the platform who relied on the developer incentive program this is extremely disappointing. Like many other developers using ADN as a backend I relied on that to make my application free and got a small amount of money each month if people voted for it with the program. It wasn't a significant amount of money but it was enough to pay for my developer membership. Now I imagine even fewer users will be on the service and I have very little incentive to keep improving the application.
- loceng 12y ago
  What were you developing for them?
  - SmileyKeith 12y ago
    Just a small client for distraction free posting. http://sailforapp.net/ http://sailforapp.net/
    - loceng 12y ago
      How much did you earn or receive from App.net's developer program to create and maintain it? It's not a free app though right?
frade33 12y ago
at the risk of being stupid, which I am, 'aint they beating the dead horse' i'd love someone to enlighten me, if it was really worth it and why? They tried hard to build an 'elite' club of rich twitter users, and it wasn't clearly going to work. Because rich people can not listen to each other. PS: i happen to be rich twitter user myself haha! i did pay them $29 and spent like a week there and quitted., because no one'd listen to me. ;)
- eridius 12y ago
  $3/mo is considered rich?
- niketdesai 12y ago
  I don't recall it being pitched as Twitter, or even Alpha at the time. I had read a lot about what Dalton believed and agreed with him. My $29 seemed paltry in the long view if he would succeed. I'm saddened by the current state of affairs. But I am glad I helped give him a shot at something I was unable or otherwise unwilling to attempt.
  - smcl 12y ago
    Perhaps its true purpose wasn't pitched strongly enough. My impression as a HN regular was that it was indeed just a paid twitter, and as such I paid it no mind.
thu 12y ago
I think everyone remembers Alpha, the Twitter clone. But there was also Backer (https://backer.app.net/ https://backer.app.net/). I looked at it a few weeks ago and I didn't understand why there was no list of currently active Backers. Actually I always been very curious about the future of App.net, especially beside the Twitter clone as I never fully grasped what you could do with it "as a platform".
- eridius 12y ago
  There's 3 Backers going on right now. A poster, a shirt, and an iOS app. They're listed on the page you linked to.
  - thu 12y ago
    Oh thanks, I didn't understood it was the list itself. When I looked at that page before, I googled a bit to see past projects and it seemed the only one I could find was the one already on that page.
jcomis 12y ago
ugh, tried to turn off auto-renewal only to find out you can't. Downgrading is the only option, and it is immediate rather than at the end of the period I already paid for. That's annoying.
windsurfer 12y ago
I've been on HN for a long time. I've seen many app.net posts fly by. I've read the start of many articles, been to their home page and even read their "Learn more" page. I still don't understand what it is. Is it something new, or just a Facebook clone? How is it different from Mozilla Persona or OAuth? I am apparently, as a web developer, their target market. I think maybe their disdain for marketing has caused their marketing and communication to suffer.
- wmf 12y ago
  You might call it a social backend. Imagine Twitter+Facebook+Dropbox but with all the UIs removed, so it's just a backend datastore with APIs. Then third parties write apps that provide different UIs on that data.
  - windsurfer 12y ago
    But isn't Twitter without a UI or userbase just basically a database, only controlled by a third party? What's the point of that? I already have MySQL and Postgres, and they are free and open source.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - eridius 12y ago
      It's a massive social graph + infrastructure for subscribing to data sources (i.e. other users) and broadcasting messages from one source to all subscribers (including push). And that's just Twitter. ADN includes a lot more than Twitter does.
  - olalonde 12y ago
    Wow, first time I actually understand what App.net is.
- sp332 12y ago
  You can store data on app.net and share it between apps. So you can have a single contact list, for example. Or share your photos in any photo album, without managing and re-uploading the same photos for different services.
mergy 12y ago
I really enjoyed ADN for quite a while. I do think though that recently there were some opportunities to make a shift to provide more visible and direct value for users if they clarified to the outside world they had many different uses. I could've seen them go down more of a road like Zoho. https://www.zoho.com/ https://www.zoho.com/ and really be outright focusing on an application or conduit infrastructure.
kirbyk 12y ago
Did this surprise anyone?
- dublinben 12y ago
  Not me. When even Leo Laporte abandons your service, you've truly failed to gain tractions. https://alpha.app.net/leolaporte https://alpha.app.net/leolaporte
  - jccalhoun 12y ago
    Leo jumps on whatever is new and then as soon as his attention is distracted he moves on to something else. The list of things that he as said he "loved" and then never mentioned again would be endless...
    - dublinben 12y ago
      I completely agree. However, he's still posting on Twitter every day, as far as I can tell. He regularly posts on Google+, even now. It says something if the social butterfly of the tech world has abandoned your service.
sylvinus 12y ago
As discussed more than 1 year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346303), the (very) hard times they had signing people up, with constant posts on HN without much effect, should have been a strong indicator people didn't actually need this.
- windsurfer 12y ago
  I think PG's comment in that same thread is spot on, now that I understand what app.net is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346470
  - bibinou 12y ago
    that is not pg.
    - windsurfer 12y ago
      Oh. Oops.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
7cupsoftea 12y ago
This post is a stark reminder that startups are extremely challenging. There are many elements and, often times, a good bit of luck needed for big success, especially when you are doing something novel (http://mariocaropreso.com/post/62811446044/nonlinearities-and-success http://mariocaropreso.com/post/62811446044/nonlinearities-an...). Nassim Taleb talks about entrepreneurs as people who should be championed when they fail. They take on projects with very long odds. It is a tough life with little upside if you don't make it big. These entrepreneurs teach us a lot. We all get to learn from the path they traveled down. Dalton tried something new and it didn't work out as planned. Someone else will build on what he started and we'll all be better for it. Failure is part of our ecosystem. These situations are good reminders that those that make it big have learned from others and have often had a few lucky breaks to help them out.
rajbala 12y ago
The big lesson learned here: don't pay a high cost to only operate at the margin. That's what App.net did --- they built out a complete product offering to only be marginally different from the alternatives.
nivertech 12y ago
Usually platforms built around some useful service or product. For example Apple built a platform for iOS devices, Microsoft for Windows OS, Facebook Platform for Facebook social network, Amazon for AWS, Google for Android, ChromeOS and Cloud Platform, etc. App.net did it in reverse, they built a platform and hoped that useful products and services will be built on it. I think they had better chances if they were white-labeled Social PaaS/BaaS/mBaaS completely hidden from the end-users. App developers would be paying for the BaaS Platform, not their app's end-users.
- kenrikm 12y ago
  The idea was to be Basically.. Parse, but where the users keep shared accounts across all apps and services. The underlying idea is good but the executions and message were lost in TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE marketing. No one knew what it was other then, "that twitter knockoff site you have to pay for".
bobbles 12y ago
I signed up at the start, was excited for it.. but even after a few months all that was really going on there were people posting about how awesome we all were for being on app.net, nothing of substance
superqd 12y ago
It makes no sense to say the renewal rate was high enough to remain profitable and self-sustaining, but you can't retain any of your employees. It sounds to me like they didn't have enough renewals to remain profitable and self-sustaining at their current burn rate, and decided to reduce the burn rate significantly in order to remain in existence. Overall, that's bad news, not good.
carrotleads 12y ago
I concur with the point that they did not differentiate enough with their free competitors. I remember being thrilled when I read Dalton initial essay on the topic and did register an account but a free one. One reason why they failed was to reduce the barriers of entry for new users. Joel had a article[1] on in Yr2000 on the levels Microsoft went to convert users from Lotus 123. My guess is Dalton and Co failed to think on these lines [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html
DigitalSea 12y ago
I feel as though App.net's day has come and gone sadly. I had high hopes for the platform, but I think it started off on the wrong foot, coming across as a clone of Twitter instead of what they really wanted to be. My understanding based on my Twitter feed alone is that many forgot to turn off auto-renew in their App.net accounts, many of the renewals were unintentional. I think this could be the last year we see App.net as we all know it, unless they can pull off something magical. I personally think they should open source the code and pivot to a support model, try and move into the enterprise somehow, but that could all just be wishful thinking. I alone wanted to see App.net succeed, but it just didn't get the traction it needed and the high price-point was a deterring factor for many developers to join. If they lowered the price to $50 or heck even $20 (which seems quite low) they would have had way more signups and I would have been more inclined to give it a longer chance/keep paying. I always felt as though App.net was an RSS reader for consuming API's. A place where you could feed in your Facebook feed, Twitter, email and more. Sadly, the public mostly saw it as a paid Twitter alternative without the advertisements.
papaver 12y ago
your code is shite... ever head of commenting?
loceng 12y ago
It was Andreessen Horowitz who put money into App.net right? They're investors in Facebook though, so isn't there a conflict of interest? Anyone know why they'd invest in App.net?
tlogan 12y ago
Sad news for App.net :( Unfortunately, I never understood what is/was the point App.net. Somebody did ask that once on Hacker News but the best answer was "it was kinda RSS feed but they now changed focus so they lost me".
- eridius 12y ago
  Fundamentally, App.Net is a platform that provides a number of services, including Twitter-like one-to-many messaging, private one-to-one and one-to-many messaging (like Twitter DM on steroids), many-to-many messaging (like IRC chatrooms), file hosting, and some less-obvious features like messages generated by and for machine consumption (that are never seen by humans), etc. These are the nuts and bolts that can be used to build a Twitter clone (which App.Net did and which is the primary "product" that most of their users used), a Dropplr clone, blogging a la Octopress, personal memory logs (like Ohai[1]), Photo story sharing apps like Sunlit[2], etc. [1]: http://ohaiapp.net http://ohaiapp.net [2]: http://sunlit.io http://sunlit.io Heck, you could even use this to build a Chess app that lets you play remotely with other players, that automatically records every move ever made, and that lets you access your games and history from any device. Basically, anything that involves sending messages (of up to 2k, plus various bits of metadata) between two or more parties and persisting them could leverage App.Net to power itself. Of course, that's part of the problem. They positioned themselves as a platform, which meant they didn't market themselves very well to end users.
EGreg 12y ago
They raised $800k! Come on?
yung_ether 12y ago
Dalton is a big failure.. Again!
thrillgore 12y ago
That's a very creative way of saying that you don't have a profitable service.

199 points by mergy 12y ago

robot 12y ago

I think there is a simple reason why app.net did not take off: There was no significant differentiation from twitter other than paid / no ads argument.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
eddyg 12y ago
However the 256-character limit in the micro-blogging service and its support for embedded links (so you didn't need to use ugly URL shorteners that hid what you were about to click-through to) and images (which did not require yet another visible URL) are very nice features.
rossk 12y ago
Half true: alpha is the Twitter clone, but in theory, that's just one app of many built on the API. The many just never happened.
- jmathai 12y ago
  You could almost say the same thing about Twitter. Their web and mobile apps are just one of many apps built on their API.
  - dasil003 12y ago
    Indeed many people including Dalton were saying that from 2007-2011ish when the Twitter API was wide open and speculation about it's potential as plumbing ran rampant. However over the last few years, it became increasing clear that the contingent of people inside Twitter who saw it as new and amazing plumbing for the next generation of applications were losing, and the contingent who saw Twitter as a media company selling advertising with a fully controller and branded user experience were the ones who won out. Anyone building an app on top of Twitter for anything other than personal or experimental use is a fool. Unfortunately for anyone building on top of App.net, it doesn't have the users to make it broadly interesting or significantly profitable.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

X-Istence 12y ago

I didn't renew my App.net subscription, there really was no value for me. Checking it along with Twitter got tiresome (I was hoping someone would integrate the two into a single client) and overall everyone I care to follow is on Twitter, it was difficult to get people interested and on the App.net bandwagon.

eridius 12y ago
> I was hoping someone would integrate the two into a single client My belief is that Twitter's rules prohibited doing precisely that. There are multiple developers that expressed an interest in creating a single app for viewing both, but never did so because Twitter would have revoked their API token.

unreal37 12y ago

Talk about a buried lede. They are profitable as long as they don't pay anyone a salary. That hardly counts as profitable. How can the service grow?

dinkumthinkum 12y ago
That's what I was thinking. That's an extremely disingenuous thing to say. This is especially since, apparently, many "renewals" were just auto-renewals and does not indicate any kind of traction.
sp332 12y ago
They still have contractors working on new features.
ry0ohki 12y ago
When I was bootstrapping my startup while working a day job, I used to wonder how to answer that question. My product was bringing in more money then the company's costs, so it felt "profitable", yet not enough to employ me full-time. Seems like there is a difference between that and something that is just plain unprofitable (where the burn rate will eventually cause the bank account to go to zero).
- superqd 12y ago
  The software doesn't write and maintain itself. So if the revenue can't cover the expense to write/maintain the codebase (i.e., dev salaries), then the app isn't profitable because one of the major costs can't be met out of revenue at 100%.
hayksaakian 12y ago
Gross profit vs net profit If you make money after non-employee costs, then scaling up X times will eventually be enough to cover costs -- especially with a software product where you don't need 10x more developers to earn 10x more money

joewee 12y ago

I signed up for app.net when it first offered the paid option and was billed for the renewal, but honestly I haven't touched the site in a year. I just forgot to cancel my subscription. I really want to support it but I have no reason to engage with it. I'm willing to support the company, so I can't understand why they don't pivot to something people are happy to pay for? I might even pay for a light social media dashboard. No reason to wind down in my opinion...

jmathai 12y ago
Not enough people willing to pay to pivot to something people are (possibly) happy to pay for. That's what App.net was. It had good signs of support at the start and they dove in head first -- I think a wise decision. The odds were against them; as they are with all startups. This just happens to be their day of reckoning.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mcone 12y ago

"The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees." Did these guys burn through over $3 million in less than a year? They got $2.5 million in August 2013. (http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/14/app-net-new-funding/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/14/app-net-new-funding/)

pcl 12y ago
Interesting. The $2.5M that mcone mentioned was venture from Andreeson Horowitz, not subscription revenue. Also, according to CrunchBase [1], their parent company has raised $7M total. I wonder if this announcement means that the parent company is shutting down, or the employees of that company are no longer working on App.net in a full-time capacity. [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mixed-media-labs http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mixed-media-labs
- neuroscr 12y ago
  The parent company is still there. It pretty much means, they're pivoting with all the money they raised.
  - neuroscr 12y ago
    I can confirm they did lay-off most of their staff though.

jaredcwhite 12y ago

It's frustrating news because the platform never actually got to the point where it could be used as back-end infrastructure in the manner of something like, say, Stripe. In other words, I couldn't built a website where users simply sign up/in, use the service, share content, etc., and not really be aware they're using App.net under the hood. I think App.net shot itself in the foot by being implemented more or less as a Twitter clone to start with. That meant that there was constantly a branding problem -- user wonders "Why am I on Website X and they're asking me to create an App.net account...what's that?!?!" We still need a ubiquitous social/identity/billing platform that undergirds the web, yet can be used seamlessly by devs of any particular site without exposing the guts of said service. I'm waiting for someone to actually build that...waiting...waiting...

hagbardgroup 12y ago
Not trying to be snarky, but isn't this "email"?
- pcl 12y ago
  I'd say "no", since existing email clients don't lend themselves to custom per-message user experiences.
  - hagbardgroup 12y ago
    Couldn't better email clients and e-mail services be made that do? I'm trying to look at this from an idiot's perspective (which may not be all that far from my ordinary perspective, because I don't know a huge amount of detail about how email works).
    - pcl 12y ago
      Theoretically, but that's not part of the model today. And if you're going to innovate on that, it's unclear that you'd want to do it on top of SMTP as a transport, rather than something newer. SMTP itself provides very little in the way of assurances about identity, deliverability, etc., all of which you'd care about as you build something higher-level. The closest thing to innovation in this space that I know of is the stuff that Gmail is doing with custom actions [1] and contextual gadgets. And even there, they are parsing the HTML-ish body of the email to trigger the behavior, which is pretty far away from the SMTP layer itself. [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions-overview https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions-...

programminggeek 12y ago

This is one more indictment to the idea that you can build a profitable business on consumer apps without just slapping on ads and then the revenues are so low per user that unless you have millions of users, it's probably not going to support much of a business.

beaumartinez 12y ago
The problem with App.net was that it offered nothing new. It was an alternative to existing free, established products—Twitter (and, to an extent, Google+ and Facebook).

davidu 12y ago

They renewed me without any reminder. I had forgotten about the service. That's irksome. And I'm willing to bet a VERY LARGE number of the renewals were people just like me. There is no business there, and worse, they auto-renewed people without a single reminder it was coming.

zwily 12y ago
Same here. I wonder how many cancellations they get today.
dannyr 12y ago
Happened to me too. I emailed them and gave me a refund.
mattlong 12y ago
Eeek, that's a bit slimy. The only reason I didn't get auto-renewed is that my credit card had expired.
- aculver 12y ago
  Hey Matt, just to clarify, the reason you didn't get auto-renewed probably has more to do with the fact that they're billing annually combined with the fact that your credit card had expired. When billing monthly, about 4 out of 5 credit cards that are expired will just keep approving transactions that are recurring. You may already be aware of this, but I mention it because it's a pretty common mistake to assume that expired cards will result in failed payments across the board, so if you didn't already know you may want to double check that there aren't other services you're not still paying for. ;-)
  - sp332 12y ago
    Not to mention, you still legally owe the service money even if your credit card isn't working. Many companies will automatically cancel your service, but if they don't, you're on the hook (since you did order the service).

moot 12y ago

I found myself in the same exact position with Canvas/DrawQuest earlier this year. Everyone (including myself) was laid off a few months ago, but we'd hoped to keep the app running with the remaining revenue/cash-on-hand and volunteered time (cut short by a recent hack). It sucks, but I think we'll see more of it in the coming months/year. A lot of the seed-funded apps/companies from the past few years simply won't represent later-stage venture opportunities, and may find themselves in a position where they can't raise additional capital but can keep the service afloat without the payroll overhead.

diggan 12y ago
Kind of off topic but what keeps you from open sourcing it and hosting with some provider that loves be showed in the light of open source?
- andreasklinger 12y ago
  We were in a similar situation and considered it. There is quite a trail of minor problems: Eg. Legal implications with investors/shareholders/etc (Unlikely but) Potential security issues Fixing the code to a level that other people can run it Documenting the code to a level that other people understand how to run it (eg dependencies on services around it) And i am pretty sure there are many more. All solvable problems but in most cases come in a moment when a founder has already ran too far and is out of cash/time/energy to tackle those.
- criley2 12y ago
  When people say "why not open source it", I begin to question something: - Are you saying, "why not pay yourself to spend many hours working your codebase into something that can be, at a minimum, copied down and installed successfully on hardware that you don't control" that doesn't violate any IP and only includes code you are legally permitted to open source - Or are you saying: "Just open up the repo as-is and see what happens!" It seems the latter option (just dump everything) is the only feasible option for a business who cannot afford additional development, but is probably immoral and illegal (you likely don't have all the rights to ALL of the code). The first option sounds great but if moot doesn't have money in the business to pay himself to do all of that work... are you suggesting he just volunteer a large amount of his personal time to do a bunch of free work for a failing business? I can understand why a developer would prefer to get paid for their effort (and the type of developer who wishes to work for free, by default, wouldn't be in this position and would have open sourced the project from the get go...)

jaxomlotus 12y ago

It was a really hard business model to support and get to work. You are paying for the forward belief that the network itself will be strong enough to ultimately justify the costs, but over time if that belief isn't met (and it wasn't) then you will lose subscribers. I give Dalton and Brian kudos for trying. Ultimately I think the lesson here is users simply aren't offended enough by ads that they would be willing to pay a subscription service to avoid them.

auxbuss 12y ago
I believe that users are sufficiently offended by ads to pay to avoid them, but clearly and provably not the price that app.net charged. I believe there's more to it than that, but the price being too high was a major contributor.
- jkrems 12y ago
  I'm not even sure the dollar price was the issue. But I would have to rebuild things like "people to follow", get used to the new interface, have the risk that the platform doesn't survive - a lot of implicit costs. What could be working is to offer a paid tier for an already existing service like Twitter - but unfortunately they have a strong incentive not to. Because it would mean that their ads would stop reaching the very people that the advertisers are interested in - the ones who are willing to spend money.

moeedm 12y ago

I give it 6 months.

mantrax5 12y ago

Remember rev="canonical"? It was to save us from the tyranny of bit.ly and co. Geeks rallied behind it. Remember Open ID? It was to save us from the tyranny of Passport.NET and co. Geeks rallied behind it. Remember Diaspora? It was to save us from the tyranny of Facebook. Geeks rallied behind it. Remember App.net...? The history of geeky "open" (or ad-free or whatever) alternatives to commercial social media services is littered with corpses. What geeks never learn is that social media services can't survive if the only appeal of the service is some righteous motivation that only they care about. Sooner or later even geeks realize that using a "better" service to talk to nobody isn't very useful. I know it seems easy to be Captain Obvious now that App.net is falling apart, but just you watch. Soon enough it'll happen again (and then again, and again).

filmgirlcw 12y ago
And before App.net, there was Identi.ca. What is disappointing about App.net was that it had the potential to be a set of pipes and a broader infrastructure rather than being simply yet another social network. And that's what my true hope for App.net was.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  Marketing is a huge part of the success of a new paradigm. App.net was "marketed" with a practically blank home page ("one login many applications" - which applications?), and a nondescript niche Twitter clone on one of its subdomains. It had no chance at all. Where was the evangelism? Where were the presentations, demos, and the other useful apps built on this platform? I'm a developer and I did hear about App.net when the buzz was at its peak. I remember going to their home page and wondering "wtf is this?", then checking alpha.app.net on a couple of occasions, finding nothing of interest and that's it. That wonderful arrogance that the world will care about your project because you're somehow "right" has killed many tech efforts and will kill a lot to come yet.
  - filmgirlcw 12y ago
    Those are really good points. I think part of the problem was the initial strategy that required all accounts to be paid limited the userbase to the point that it wasn't worth experimenting with. I don't know how you get around that challenge of building a mass userbase, keeping the framework open and yet still being sustainable. But that's a separate challenge from what you described.

jimmytidey 12y ago

For me pieces of infrastructure like Twitter shouldn't be owned by for profit companies. A Twitter-like public forum ought to be the town square of the web, and it should run along the same lines as Wikipedia. The data should be ours to do as we please with, there should be no purchasing access through adverts. App.net, and the insanely confusing concept of the Alpha app within it, might not have been the right solution, but they were asking the right question.

ForHackernews 12y ago
We need protocols, not platforms. Unfortunately, it's 2014, and protocols are not sexy.
- drpancake 12y ago
  Unless you count the wave of innovation coming out of cryptocurrencies, which are really just protocols for managing a blockchain. A decentralised Twitter could theoretically be built with this model.
  - __david__ 12y ago
    Isn't a decentralized twitter just email?
    - fzltrp 12y ago
      ...With the exception that everyone can read every emails (or is there a private tweet feature with twitter?).
- riffic 12y ago
  http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
pjc50 12y ago
The only question is "who pays for the infrastructure". Wikipedia has done extremely well with its donation drives; that's very hard to repeat. App.net seems to have struggled to make users pay directly. Arguably the whatsapp charging model has worked best.

jusben1369 12y ago

I'm always think "rage" startups are the most risky. App.net was based on a super small but vocal group that hated advertising in their social apps. Dwolla is a payments based rage sort of startup born from a founder who hated paying 3% of his money to credit card fees. A very small, passionate, group can convince each other that there must be enough people like them or even similar enough to dramatically change their behavior (create a whole new payment flow, try and get important and interesting information through a new source) The problem is after that 5% of passionate users you just fall off a cliff in terms of how much effort then next 5% and ultimately 95% will do.

snide 12y ago
Agreed. Though it's easier to spot in retrospect. Crowds on the Internet can look larger than they seem.
- untog 12y ago
  It was kind of easy to spot at the time. App.net never really felt like it took off.
pinaceae 12y ago
same with https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ i guess.
- lmm 12y ago
  The problem there is that it's too hard to get an account. How would I know someone who has one?
noblethrasher 12y ago
In other words, your customers’ passion should be fire rather than fuel.
tomasien 12y ago
If you think the 3% in CC fees is something felt by a small number of businesses you're so, so very wrong. Dwolla is actually doing quite well despite the fact that it's insanely hard to pay with Dwolla if you don't have an account - that's how much businesses hate the fees. They push it anyway. Programmers making SaaS products often don't understand but that 3% is often 30% to as much as 90% of a businesses margin.

SmileyKeith 12y ago

As a developer on the platform who relied on the developer incentive program this is extremely disappointing. Like many other developers using ADN as a backend I relied on that to make my application free and got a small amount of money each month if people voted for it with the program. It wasn't a significant amount of money but it was enough to pay for my developer membership. Now I imagine even fewer users will be on the service and I have very little incentive to keep improving the application.

loceng 12y ago
What were you developing for them?
- SmileyKeith 12y ago
  Just a small client for distraction free posting. http://sailforapp.net/ http://sailforapp.net/
  - loceng 12y ago
    How much did you earn or receive from App.net's developer program to create and maintain it? It's not a free app though right?

frade33 12y ago

at the risk of being stupid, which I am, 'aint they beating the dead horse' i'd love someone to enlighten me, if it was really worth it and why? They tried hard to build an 'elite' club of rich twitter users, and it wasn't clearly going to work. Because rich people can not listen to each other. PS: i happen to be rich twitter user myself haha! i did pay them $29 and spent like a week there and quitted., because no one'd listen to me. ;)

eridius 12y ago
$3/mo is considered rich?
niketdesai 12y ago
I don't recall it being pitched as Twitter, or even Alpha at the time. I had read a lot about what Dalton believed and agreed with him. My $29 seemed paltry in the long view if he would succeed. I'm saddened by the current state of affairs. But I am glad I helped give him a shot at something I was unable or otherwise unwilling to attempt.
- smcl 12y ago
  Perhaps its true purpose wasn't pitched strongly enough. My impression as a HN regular was that it was indeed just a paid twitter, and as such I paid it no mind.

thu 12y ago

I think everyone remembers Alpha, the Twitter clone. But there was also Backer (https://backer.app.net/ https://backer.app.net/). I looked at it a few weeks ago and I didn't understand why there was no list of currently active Backers. Actually I always been very curious about the future of App.net, especially beside the Twitter clone as I never fully grasped what you could do with it "as a platform".

eridius 12y ago
There's 3 Backers going on right now. A poster, a shirt, and an iOS app. They're listed on the page you linked to.
- thu 12y ago
  Oh thanks, I didn't understood it was the list itself. When I looked at that page before, I googled a bit to see past projects and it seemed the only one I could find was the one already on that page.

jcomis 12y ago

ugh, tried to turn off auto-renewal only to find out you can't. Downgrading is the only option, and it is immediate rather than at the end of the period I already paid for. That's annoying.

windsurfer 12y ago

I've been on HN for a long time. I've seen many app.net posts fly by. I've read the start of many articles, been to their home page and even read their "Learn more" page. I still don't understand what it is. Is it something new, or just a Facebook clone? How is it different from Mozilla Persona or OAuth? I am apparently, as a web developer, their target market. I think maybe their disdain for marketing has caused their marketing and communication to suffer.

wmf 12y ago
You might call it a social backend. Imagine Twitter+Facebook+Dropbox but with all the UIs removed, so it's just a backend datastore with APIs. Then third parties write apps that provide different UIs on that data.
- windsurfer 12y ago
  But isn't Twitter without a UI or userbase just basically a database, only controlled by a third party? What's the point of that? I already have MySQL and Postgres, and they are free and open source.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - eridius 12y ago
    It's a massive social graph + infrastructure for subscribing to data sources (i.e. other users) and broadcasting messages from one source to all subscribers (including push). And that's just Twitter. ADN includes a lot more than Twitter does.
- olalonde 12y ago
  Wow, first time I actually understand what App.net is.
sp332 12y ago
You can store data on app.net and share it between apps. So you can have a single contact list, for example. Or share your photos in any photo album, without managing and re-uploading the same photos for different services.

mergy 12y ago

I really enjoyed ADN for quite a while. I do think though that recently there were some opportunities to make a shift to provide more visible and direct value for users if they clarified to the outside world they had many different uses. I could've seen them go down more of a road like Zoho. https://www.zoho.com/ https://www.zoho.com/ and really be outright focusing on an application or conduit infrastructure.

kirbyk 12y ago

Did this surprise anyone?

dublinben 12y ago
Not me. When even Leo Laporte abandons your service, you've truly failed to gain tractions. https://alpha.app.net/leolaporte https://alpha.app.net/leolaporte
- jccalhoun 12y ago
  Leo jumps on whatever is new and then as soon as his attention is distracted he moves on to something else. The list of things that he as said he "loved" and then never mentioned again would be endless...
  - dublinben 12y ago
    I completely agree. However, he's still posting on Twitter every day, as far as I can tell. He regularly posts on Google+, even now. It says something if the social butterfly of the tech world has abandoned your service.

sylvinus 12y ago

As discussed more than 1 year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346303), the (very) hard times they had signing people up, with constant posts on HN without much effect, should have been a strong indicator people didn't actually need this.

windsurfer 12y ago
I think PG's comment in that same thread is spot on, now that I understand what app.net is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346470
- bibinou 12y ago
  that is not pg.
  - windsurfer 12y ago
    Oh. Oops.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

7cupsoftea 12y ago

This post is a stark reminder that startups are extremely challenging. There are many elements and, often times, a good bit of luck needed for big success, especially when you are doing something novel (http://mariocaropreso.com/post/62811446044/nonlinearities-and-success http://mariocaropreso.com/post/62811446044/nonlinearities-an...). Nassim Taleb talks about entrepreneurs as people who should be championed when they fail. They take on projects with very long odds. It is a tough life with little upside if you don't make it big. These entrepreneurs teach us a lot. We all get to learn from the path they traveled down. Dalton tried something new and it didn't work out as planned. Someone else will build on what he started and we'll all be better for it. Failure is part of our ecosystem. These situations are good reminders that those that make it big have learned from others and have often had a few lucky breaks to help them out.

rajbala 12y ago

The big lesson learned here: don't pay a high cost to only operate at the margin. That's what App.net did --- they built out a complete product offering to only be marginally different from the alternatives.

nivertech 12y ago

Usually platforms built around some useful service or product. For example Apple built a platform for iOS devices, Microsoft for Windows OS, Facebook Platform for Facebook social network, Amazon for AWS, Google for Android, ChromeOS and Cloud Platform, etc. App.net did it in reverse, they built a platform and hoped that useful products and services will be built on it. I think they had better chances if they were white-labeled Social PaaS/BaaS/mBaaS completely hidden from the end-users. App developers would be paying for the BaaS Platform, not their app's end-users.

kenrikm 12y ago
The idea was to be Basically.. Parse, but where the users keep shared accounts across all apps and services. The underlying idea is good but the executions and message were lost in TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE marketing. No one knew what it was other then, "that twitter knockoff site you have to pay for".

bobbles 12y ago

I signed up at the start, was excited for it.. but even after a few months all that was really going on there were people posting about how awesome we all were for being on app.net, nothing of substance

superqd 12y ago

It makes no sense to say the renewal rate was high enough to remain profitable and self-sustaining, but you can't retain any of your employees. It sounds to me like they didn't have enough renewals to remain profitable and self-sustaining at their current burn rate, and decided to reduce the burn rate significantly in order to remain in existence. Overall, that's bad news, not good.

carrotleads 12y ago

I concur with the point that they did not differentiate enough with their free competitors. I remember being thrilled when I read Dalton initial essay on the topic and did register an account but a free one. One reason why they failed was to reduce the barriers of entry for new users. Joel had a article[1] on in Yr2000 on the levels Microsoft went to convert users from Lotus 123. My guess is Dalton and Co failed to think on these lines [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

DigitalSea 12y ago

I feel as though App.net's day has come and gone sadly. I had high hopes for the platform, but I think it started off on the wrong foot, coming across as a clone of Twitter instead of what they really wanted to be. My understanding based on my Twitter feed alone is that many forgot to turn off auto-renew in their App.net accounts, many of the renewals were unintentional. I think this could be the last year we see App.net as we all know it, unless they can pull off something magical. I personally think they should open source the code and pivot to a support model, try and move into the enterprise somehow, but that could all just be wishful thinking. I alone wanted to see App.net succeed, but it just didn't get the traction it needed and the high price-point was a deterring factor for many developers to join. If they lowered the price to $50 or heck even $20 (which seems quite low) they would have had way more signups and I would have been more inclined to give it a longer chance/keep paying. I always felt as though App.net was an RSS reader for consuming API's. A place where you could feed in your Facebook feed, Twitter, email and more. Sadly, the public mostly saw it as a paid Twitter alternative without the advertisements.

papaver 12y ago

your code is shite... ever head of commenting?

loceng 12y ago

It was Andreessen Horowitz who put money into App.net right? They're investors in Facebook though, so isn't there a conflict of interest? Anyone know why they'd invest in App.net?

tlogan 12y ago

Sad news for App.net :( Unfortunately, I never understood what is/was the point App.net. Somebody did ask that once on Hacker News but the best answer was "it was kinda RSS feed but they now changed focus so they lost me".

eridius 12y ago
Fundamentally, App.Net is a platform that provides a number of services, including Twitter-like one-to-many messaging, private one-to-one and one-to-many messaging (like Twitter DM on steroids), many-to-many messaging (like IRC chatrooms), file hosting, and some less-obvious features like messages generated by and for machine consumption (that are never seen by humans), etc. These are the nuts and bolts that can be used to build a Twitter clone (which App.Net did and which is the primary "product" that most of their users used), a Dropplr clone, blogging a la Octopress, personal memory logs (like Ohai[1]), Photo story sharing apps like Sunlit[2], etc. [1]: http://ohaiapp.net http://ohaiapp.net [2]: http://sunlit.io http://sunlit.io Heck, you could even use this to build a Chess app that lets you play remotely with other players, that automatically records every move ever made, and that lets you access your games and history from any device. Basically, anything that involves sending messages (of up to 2k, plus various bits of metadata) between two or more parties and persisting them could leverage App.Net to power itself. Of course, that's part of the problem. They positioned themselves as a platform, which meant they didn't market themselves very well to end users.

EGreg 12y ago

They raised $800k! Come on?

yung_ether 12y ago

Dalton is a big failure.. Again!

thrillgore 12y ago

That's a very creative way of saying that you don't have a profitable service.