
Some Thoughts on App.net - aaronbrethorst
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2012/07/15/SomeThoughtsOnAppnet.aspx
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thristian
Has everybody already forgotten that OStatus¹ is a federated, open,
production-ready protocol for Twitter-like notifications? Seems like building
an OStatus-based clearing-house for messages and charging based on message
volume would be a more sensible thing than trying to start a whole new
ecosystem.

¹
[http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-2-s...](http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-2-specification.html)

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HarrietJones
Interestingly, I tried to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time
and got 0 traction on it.

[http://seanbamforth.tumblr.com/post/27281933264/how-app-
net-...](http://seanbamforth.tumblr.com/post/27281933264/how-app-net-screwed-
me-over-or-some-other-misleading)

Dalton says a lot, but there's the sneaking suspicion that he wants to control
the space. Personally, I'd be happier with: \- A charitable organisation
handling the registration of names for multiple twitter like organisations.
(Like DNS) \- Multiple providers (free, freemium, paid) \- Some way of routing
messages to the correct provider. \- Some way of transferring messages between
providers.

We managed this 25+ years ago with email. There's no reason it couldn't be
done again.

~~~
icebraining
As thristian posted, this has already been done, and it's called OStatus.

And you don't need a charitable organization running something like DNS; you
can use _DNS itself_. The user ids just become like email, e.g.
username@server.tld.

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obvio171
The original post by Dalton mentions freemium services such as Github and
Dropbox as examples, so following a similar model and charging for certain
features might allow for network effects to happen (although those examples
aren't nearly as dependent on that).

~~~
JamesLeonis
I can see a usage based charge system where a certain amount is free, and then
you are charged based on usage after that. Imagine a Heroku model for Twitter.
Many users can get by with the free model, while businesses will likely be the
ones going over the free limit and into the pay-per-tweet area.

Imagine you get 3,000 posts per month free. That's an average of 4 posts per
hour every 24 hour period (6-8 more likely, because sleep). Most users won't
come close to that, but businesses likely will depending on their usage and
nature. You could even go the wireless phone route where you buy a
subscription of messages in blocks, like 6,000 or 10,000 etc. This allows for
monetization without punishing those who are experimenting or casually using
the service.

~~~
obvio171
I like this model, because then you have a scarce resource (albeit
artificially so) that costs you nothing to make more of and you can use it to
encourage users to do stuff you want, like inviting others. You could very
well do it Dropbox style: you get 500 posts for every friend who signs up, and
they get 500 too (starting out with 3500 in your example). It's not spamming
if there's a gift.

If there's a "Like" or "retweet" equivalent you might also get extra posts for
that (like you get more credits to post questions on Quora when people upvote
your answers or follow your questions).

