7 ms·
Where Did App.net Go Wrong?
- opendais 12y agoI think it really boiled down to the fact the market for "paid Twitter" was too small to support the kind of network effects required to create an entire ecosystem.
- astrodust 12y agoI have never heard even one compelling argument for why paying for app.net makes sense. I pay money and...? I honestly have no idea.
- smackfu 12y agoI pay money and... they don't keep trying to stuff monetizing junk all up in my twitter feed.
- Titanbase 12y agoEverything you want to know about App.net is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Caldwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Caldwell It's an interesting project!
- astrodust 12y agoFor an "interesting project", the home-page communicates zero information: https://app.net/ https://app.net/ So many words and yet I really have a hard time grasping why I'd ever want to use this thing.
- arielm 12y agoIf Wikipedia does a better job explaining the service than the service's own site it's in trouble. If there was no competition maybe, but there is, and everyone knows about it.
- bentlegen 12y agoYou pay money, Dalton becomes a partner at YC.
- smacktoward 12y agoEverybody wins! Oh. Wait.
- Karunamon 12y agoWasn't the twitter-wannabe just one of a number of applications on their platform?
- minimaxir 12y agoIt was the initial use case, and it was the use case that App.net crowd funded $500k for. First impressions mean a lot.
- arielm 12y agoIt's very true, but they: 1. never really made it clear 2. never explained what else that framework was good for 3. never grew out of being a Twitter clone.
- opendais 12y agoIt was the primary application at the start and without a large enough userbase, no other applications ever achieved significant adoption.
- smackfu 12y agoMain problem was that Twitter wasn't quite bad enough for people to stop using it. Even if the website / official app was a mess, most of the App.net early adopters use third-party Twitter clients anyways. If even the people who paid for App.net were still using both systems, and cross-posting, that wasn't really sustainable once the initial interest was gone.
- jhardcastle 12y agoSite appears to be down, Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RxMTeUF5-CkJ:arielmichaeli.com/2014/07/where-did-app-net-go-wrong/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RxMTeUF...
- arielm 12y agoThanks for sharing the cached version! The blog is back up and is fortified with a few layers of caching :)
- knd775 12y agoYou really can tell when people have websites not meant for any significant traffic. Site is down.
- mikeash 12y agoTo me, it was two things: 1. As a Twitter replacement, it solved the wrong problem. They seemed to think that the flaw with Twitter is that it's free. In my opinion, the flaw with Twitter is that it's centralized. 2. Every time I mention how the Twitter replacement isn't compelling, people would talk about how that's not what it is, it's a general platform for Stuff that just happens to be something you can use to build a Twitter replacement. But they never really explained what it was, just that it wasn't merely a Twitter replacement.
- bentlegen 12y agoPeople didn't plunk down $50 for a "general platform for stuff".
- arielm 12y agoWell said.
- xxxmadraxxx 12y ago"...They seemed to think that the flaw with Twitter is that it's free. In my opinion, the flaw with Twitter is that it's centralized..." The flaw that made me leave Twatter for App.net was the ever-increasing amount of stinking advertising [laughingly known as 'Sponsored Tweets' ] littering my stream, combined with the relentless barrage of spam emails from Twitter themselves. Alpha offered everything Twatter did, as well as double length posts and without spamverts. Unfortunately [and I agree with previous comments on App.net's piss-poor marketting] few people even knew it existed.
- bmm6o 12y agoWhere did App.net go right? I generally like the vision that App.net was promoting, but when you are trying to build something that relies on network effects for success you need to remove every impediment to attracting users. They've had several glaring impediments since day 1.
- arielm 12y agoI think trying to monitize the way they did was a big mistake. A social network isn't really a business tool and mass-market consumers aren't ready to shell our a monthly fee for a new and unnecessary way to communicate. Twitter, the giant that's integrated into pretty much everywhere, is still fighting for engagement and new signups. So for a company to come and challenge them with such a vague value proposition is plain bad.
- yllus 12y agoI think that makes sense. I wonder though if WhatsApp is an outlier - did they always charge a flat fee to use their messenger client, or is that a recent thing (after they attracted immense numbers of users)?
- arielm 12y agoThat's a somewhat different use-case though because the alternative (text-messages) always had some sort of price tag, and iMessage wasn't around when WhatsApp started.
- ksec 12y agoThey just dont have a sustainable business model. That's all.
- arielm 12y agoI think if their concept was clearer the business model would have evolved to be effective. It's hard to get it right the first time but with a strong enough base they could have iterated.
- dmarlow 12y agoI still don't know what it is...
- beejiu 12y agoThe only thing that went wrong with App.net is that it felt like you had to be part of some inner circle to understand what they were actually doing. Their communication and marketing was, and still is, diabolical. I still have no idea what they are selling.
- arielm 12y agoI totally agree, a clear message can make it or break it for a service, especially one with such a strong competitor.
- pjbrunet 12y agoIt didn't solve the problem of centralized control.
- mrcwinn 12y agoApp.net was born out of a visceral, snap reaction to Twitter's API decisions that, really, the mainstream didn't really care about. That's not enough to build a product on top of. What's more, while I sympathize with the developers who were negatively impacted by Twitter's decisions, one could argue the choices they made were _right_ for the product. If you believe that, App.net's decision, the inverse, was _wrong_ for the product (reducing quality and focus). Or in short, most people just don't care.
- arielm 12y agoThat's definitely what it feels like, a visceral reaction, but from everything I could piece together it was about much more. Dalton tried to create a platform for communication that could power a twitter-like service. But... he never really explained it and in the absence of a message everyone had to figure out the message on their own using what's most obvious. That's how it became a twitter-clone/wannabe.
- mrcwinn 12y agoYes, I agree. Selling a platform is different from selling a product - especially when you're speaking directly to the consumers. Consumers want the product, not the platform.
- itistoday2 12y agoCharging money. Centralized. Personal data stored in the clear.
- palakchokshi 12y agoI still don't know what app.net is about after reading their About section. Seems like a mish mash of products. Their messaging is very confusing. I couldn't figure out why, me as a user, would ever download and use their app(s)?
- pbreit 12y agoApp.net's problem was that it was a philosophy, not something that people would actually want to use.
- bradshaw1965 12y agoAt least part of the problem was the resentment that people felt about needing to sign up to paid service to keep their identity and follow their friends. Their was implied social proof in the very beginning but with a pretty big arm twist.
- m52go 12y agoI'm the first person to criticize free online media, but they should have remained free until gaining a critical mass of users and THEN charged them to stay on. That's how Twitter should work...think Lady Gaga or Barack Obama are going to leave Twitter over a $200 annual fee now? Nope, but they're sure as hell not joining an unproven network with an upfront $20 annual fee. Of course, you'd have to be clear about this in advance. Nobody likes an unexpected bait-and-switch.
- arielm 12y agoOr use some sort of a freemium model much like the one they ended up doing anyway.
- m52go 12y agoI should have been clearer...I think that model is effective only when users who have disproportionally significant influence are charged. So Gaga and Obama should actually be charged an annual fee of something like $20,000. Maybe it's tiered, so someone like Robert Scoble pays $2,000. Going by number of followers, Gaga's influence is an entire order of magnitude higher than Scoble's, so it makes sense for her fee to be an order of magnitude higher. Everyone else below a certain threshold is free. I wouldn't (and shouldn't) pay for Twitter...it gives me little influence.
- imsofuture 12y agoSeems like a lot of beanplating around "it wasn't actually compelling to enough people to make money".
- arielm 12y agoAs a twitter-clone only, sure. But I think it was supposed to be about much more than that.
- eridius 12y ago> If Dalton’s idea of the platform was really to create a Twitter-like messaging service he should have made it easier to access. This is actually the complete opposite of what happened, and I think the key to where they went wrong. Dalton created a Twitter-like messaging service as a way of showcasing what App.Net could do. But he seemed very intent on downplaying the service and focusing on App.Net as a platform. This is what caused all the confusion; most of the actual users of App.Net were primarily users of Alpha, and anyone who was creating a product with the App.Net platform were facing the confusion of people thinking that's like creating a product with Twitter. I believe the reason Dalton did this was because his dream was for him to solely care about the platform and for other developers to provide all the apps. But nobody else was going to provide an Alpha clone, nor should they. What Dalton really should have done was immediately spun off Alpha into its own full-fledged product. Give it a snappy name (heck, Alpha isn't too bad, certainly better than App.Net), give it its own domain, and make it very clearly a distinct product from App.Net. Then he could brand it all he wants as "built on top of App.Net" or whatever, and having login, etc. go through the app.net domain, but ultimately it should have been immediately recognizable as what it was; a Twitter-like messaging service (with much better features), that was built on top of App.Net. Just like a third-party app would have been. This would have made it much easier to understand. People talking about App.Net would be obviously talking about the platform, people talking about Alpha would be talking about the messaging service, and trying to encourage people to build new apps on top of the App.Net platform would have made far more sense than convincing people to build new apps on top of what they think is basically just a Twitter clone.
- arielm 12y agoI fully agree. Separation would have made it easier to understand it's not the goal but rather an implementation.