
Daring Fireball: App.net - jazzychad
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/08/app-net
======
LVB
I prefer the App.net endorsement by Pinboard's founder:

<https://twitter.com/baconmeteor/status/223947369467744259>

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zenocon
Building a Twitter clone with Twitter Bootstrap - oh the irony

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Argorak
I am not sure whether this funding drive is actually meant to succeed. Let me
search my tinfoil hat before continuing...

When talking with VCs, mass-market and transaction-based is always a tough
sell. So why not try a funding drive that might not succeed, but show a good
amount of interest? You get 2 things out of it:

a) Contacts of people actually wanting to buy your product and are vocal about
it. b) Proof that there is interested in your concept.

Especially in the social network space, where fees are something rather
unheard of, you won't be able to sell "like Twitter, but with payed accounts"
very well. Then again, I regularly meet people that would like to pay for
their Twitter account for certain benefits (like being able to verify their
account instead of hoping that Twitter deems their request worthy). So this
funding drive looks like a proof-of-concept to me much more than a success or
die action.

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ricardobeat
Apparently heello.com is also attempting a comeback, no dollars required:
<http://new.heello.com/>

Their interface was nice. They want to build a third-party friendly ecosystem
but still base it on ads, I wonder how...

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Reebz
With such a lofty goal I do not understand why they capped at $1000 donations.
Missing out on the big fish.

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Kilimanjaro
Jaiku didn't have advertisers yet it failed.

I really root for app.net to succeed, also somebody please come up with a
better Facebook, too much identity info managed by these two companies to feel
a little unease, specially after their privacy fiascos.

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gojomo
Drawing useful lessons from Jaiku is confounded by the Google acquisition.
(See also: Dodgeball.)

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DigitalSea
A better Twitter? I've never heard those kind of sentences being thrown around
before. Shut up and take my money... In all seriousness though, you can build
something better than Twitter but it's the Google problem all over again: the
market is cornered and unless you've got big pockets like Facebook or Apple,
you've got no chance of going toe-to-toe with the big guys like Twitter.

~~~
Argorak
Maybe a crowd-funding drive upfront is actually a good action in that case. If
it succeeds, you have roughly ~50000 seed users that have a vested interest in
seeing your product succeed.

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bobbles
Now a (member) backer for this project. I think there is definitely a market
for this style of approach. (ie. charge for quality instead of ad-supported.)

Good luck guys

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iradik
I seem to have a flashback just now when github's battle cry was that they
didn't accept VC money.

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adriand
I'm tempted to contribute to App.net, because it seems like a great idea and
I'd like to see it succeed. However, I'm starting to think that I just may
have no use for social networks of any kind at all any more.

Twitter feels like work to read and "maintain" and we're always told we have
to maintain it. Facebook feels like a cesspool. I've been focused on spending
time each day on learning new skills (and relearning old ones) and I'm
enjoying it far more than I ever enjoyed social networking, and I'm actually
getting something out of it. When I want to read something, I either come to
HN or I read a book (a good book is worth at least 10,000 tweets or 1,000 blog
posts, so what is really the point of all those endless tweets?)

I sometimes try to imagine the people I truly respect (the authors and
inventors and scientists) spending all kinds of time on Twitter and Facebook
and I keep failing.

~~~
drumdance
Amen. I drastically cut back my use of Twitter and Facebook several months ago
and have not missed them at all.

~~~
chucknelson
Same experience here - cut way back on my Twitter use. I see Twitter as mostly
for celebrities and community leaders (tech community or whatever) to
entertain us, provide interesting insight, or spread important news. Overall,
though, it all isn't very important in our lives and it's not worth it to
monitor all day every day.

Take people like Gruber, though, who now integrate this type of social service
into their work - it is now really important to them. And of course they will
communicate to us that "hey, this is really important!".

I'd say for most of us ("the general public"), it's just not that important.

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barclay
Jesus. I hadn't realized it's $50 to sign up. May be awesome, but that's a
high price to experiment with.

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DJSundog
It's $50 for a year of service. One crappy Starbucks coffee a month isn't bad
to be treated like a customer instead of a set of eyeballs to sell.

(Yes, I'm a backer.)

~~~
bentlegen
Counter analogy: I'd rather have a coffee every day for a month than throw $50
in the garbage.

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nell
As much as I want app.net to launch .. I don't think the campaign will reach
its goal.

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imaginator
Anyone remember “Go to AOL Keyword: Coke”?

I try to avoid blowing the buddycloud trumpet (we're building an open
federated/distributed social network) on hn each time there is a future-of-
twitter post. Sorry - I can't hold back this time. Here's my context for
reading this app.net post:

Twitter works in the same way the old AOL client did: you accessed some
message boards and stock prices and film websites using AOL keywords.
Marketers flocked to AOL to put up the latest movie premier website.

At the same time there was the small techno-elite downloading Mosaic 0.98 over
their SLIP connection and starting to experiment with the "world wide web". In
comparison with the closed systems like Compuserve and AOL, the open web took
much longer to evolve becasue everybody was working on different parts without
any central coordination. It was this lack of central coordination that brougt
us a more robust system and I don't think that any of us will argue for a
world where AOL is the gold standard of finding, hosting and accessing
content.

Twitter is pushing hard to be the gold standard of messaging in the same way
that AOL did. And are marketers flocking to work with Twitter along with
newscasters giving out hashtags and @twitter-names.

But, in the backrooms and basements and hackerspaces of the internet, today's
equivalent of Mosaic downloaders are experimenting with open, distributed
social networks like buddycloud.

The buddycloud team and everyone who attends our hackathons that are working
to build the post-Twitter future just like Netscape helped launch the open
web.

The future will not be build around one company, but a couple of companies
like buddycloud can help nudge it forward. The future will be protocol based
rather than homesteading on another company's API for fear of API key
revocation.

So to app.net,

I see them fitting into the twitter ecosystem like a paid email provider that
doesn't let you send email outside of their domain: You are still tied to one
company. Still tied into hoping your API key doesn't get revoked. To move away
from Twitter, we must think bigger: a giant network like email where everyone
can run their own servers and they all interconnect.

We're trying to solve some of these problems with buddycloud. And props to the
buddycloud team, I think they are doing a great job. I'll go back to biting my
toungue on each new future-of-twitter post.

~~~
xam
What did you think about diaspora?

~~~
imaginator
They have definitely captured mindshare and championed the need for federated
systems. I've not tried Diaspora though so can't comment.

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cstrat
I signed up after reading this post!

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xam
Seems more like an elitest social network than anything. That might not be
such a terrible thing- after all, Facebook started out only allowing people
with .edu email addresses. Metafilter now charges a one-time fee of $5. I'll
be interested to see what happens with App.net.

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gubatron
What really needs to happen here is that there needs to be a truly free social
stream service for the internet, owned by none and by all.

Only then you will have total developer freedom, and no censorhip possible.

If you've also been thinking about this for the last 2 weeks, drop a line.

Think of IRC evolved (message horizon based on #tags not rooms, just like
Twitter), syndicated, P2P Server Network, served over HTTP to the end user so
that it has all of what Twitter has to offer (maybe a few more characters)

would love to think together with people who like tough challenges about a new
HTTP on top of P2P architecture to solve this and other problems to leave a
new arm of the internet for our kids.

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briandear
Can you convince some mom at the gym to pay $50 to use App.net? If the answer
is no, then that's a big problem in building a sustainable social business.
Most people don't see a "problem" with Twitter. I occasionally have seen a
sponsored tweet, but it's even less obtrusive than google and EVERYBODY uses
google. Convincing the soccer mom set to ditch facebook and twitter over some
nebulous concept of a developer-friendly social thingy.. not going to happen.

To me it seems like the App.net gents are playing this power to the people
angle just as a hook to justify funding for a twitter clone.

I can make a twitter clone (and an API to go with it) in less than a weekend.
If I wanted it to be beautiful, my buddy and I could spend a month of evenings
working on it and it would cost us no more than the price of the beers.

I am starting to think that this entire thing is a scam. A publicity stunt to
convince people to pay $50 for something that could be built by following the
Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial and the Service Oriented Design with Ruby book.

This whole project is too much "inside baseball" the user on the street
doesn't care, doesn't want to care because it really doesn't solve any problem
for them. A pay-per-tweet platform? C'mon, who actually thinks that has
business potential? Especially if just a few people are using it. None of my
friends are on it. So what value is the "social" component to me? I don't know
a single person on App.net, so why the heck would I spend my development time
building some "robust" app atop of a platform that no one is using? You get 10
million users and then I'll potentially care about the API.

~~~
dannyr
People pay for Angie's List ($46 a year).

If the early members of App.net built a great community and become a good
resource, regular people would pay for it.

~~~
endersshadow
People get immediate value out of Angie's List: Vetted services. Angie's List
has an actual story--everybody's had a terrible experience with a plumber,
electrician, or other service. Not everybody has had a terrible experience
getting data out of Twitter. Most people really don't care about that.

I think there's a vast, vast difference between the two.

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89a
This whole thing is a bit of a joke. I especially find it hilarious that
they're calling it app.net only because they spent probably a decent sum of
money on a 3 letter domain for their (failing?) marketing tools.

App.net as a name makes absolutely no sense (and not like other senseless
names like Wii or whatever, but as in it already means something else) and
quite frankly I'm shocked that people like Gruber and Marco are on board with
this ridiculous bound to fail idea.

Also why on earth they adopted the Kickstarter model instead of the
Pinboard.in model is beyond me. Can only imagine they got a lust for instant
#swag

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anu_gupta
> Also why on earth they adopted the Kickstarter model instead of the
> Pinboard.in model is beyond me.

I would derive value from pinboard if I was the only subscriber. The same
cannot be said for a social network like app.net.

I joined Twitter in September 2006, but I didn't start really using it until
December 2006 when some friends and colleagues signed up.

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capex
The 11px font on daringfireball.net seems like a notice board to the user. Get
ready to squint, zoom in, or go away. I am not budging.

~~~
xam
Pssst.... <command> <+>

~~~
capex
That's why i wrote 'zoom in'

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fromhet
So, someone made a twitter clone?

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H_L
App.net is not Twitter. It's an infrastructure, upon which new social services
can bloom. It's AWS.

~~~
briandear
We have infrastructure. It's called AWS. The infrastructure of App.net is not
revolutionary or even that interesting. Why do new social services need this
infrastructure?

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gubatron
There's just one thing that's odd here.

How do you avoid Marketers disguised as developers?

You will still get the ads no matter what one way or another.

~~~
fredleblanc
Full disclosure: I backed the project.

I think it's fine if marketers use the service. It's similar to Twitter in
that you can choose who you follow. The difference is that if I want Coke in
my timeline, I have to follow Coke (or someone cleverly disguised as not Coke)
in my follow list.

If companies add their brand to app.net, fine. If people opt-in to follow
those brands, also fine. No harm to everyone else.

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RexRollman
The problem I have with all these sites is that they are run by for-profit
companies, which (for me) makes them untrustworthy. I would love to see a
social networking site run by a democratic non-profit organization dedicated
to freedom.

~~~
xentronium
Like... diaspora?

~~~
RexRollman
Diaspora's distributed nature makes it a non-starter for me.

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mortenjorck
This service is better-designed than Craigslist! You should sign up!

This service is more privacy-sensitive than Facebook! You should sign up!

This service is less dickish than Twitter! You should sign up!

Sure, it's possible to unseat an entrenched juggernaut. But you don't beat a
MySpace unless you're, well, a Facebook. You can't best the incumbent on one
factor alone. You have to build an experience that is so radically more
compelling that people will actually give up their existing network on the old
product just to use yours. And that kind of product is a genuine rarity.

~~~
jmduke
This service costs $50/year more than Craigslist! This service costs $50/year
more than Facebook! This service costs $50/year more than Twitter!

~~~
redslazer
I'm really not sure why people are down voting you. It is absolutely true.
Most people are not prepared to take out their credit card for something like
this. app.net becomes valuable once it has data but it needs users for data.

Most users of twitter are not developers, they get their value from the free
frontend. Developers are complaining because they don't have access to the
data. So they want non-developers to pay so they can have data for free. These
non-developers dont really see any value in giving data to developers.

app.net wants to sell a story, but it wants people to pay for it. Duckduckgo
is also selling a story but for free which is why its doing so well. If DDG
pitch was pay us money for a privacy concerned SE then it to would have
miserably failed.

(this is not a prediction that app.net will fail, I really hope it works)

~~~
dannyr
Ok. I downvoted all the posts this thread up to the parent because I feel
posts like these make the HN community stink.

If a startup raise a massive amount of funding with no revenue model, a lot of
people here scream bubble.

Now you have a startup that has a revenue model and not seeking additional
funding, people still keep leaving snarky comments.

There is a big difference if a company makes money from users vs advertisers.

Companies focus on what gives them revenue and I'm excited to see what App.Net
can create if they focus just on the users.

~~~
jmduke
I'm sorry if you interpreted my comment as nothing else than snarky. Truth be
told, I want app.net to succeed, but as pretty much one of its target members
(young, vaguely hip, and I love reading tech blogs) I still haven't found the
answer to the following question:

What advantage does app.net have over the mainstream options if I don't care
about privacy/'dickishness' and how is that worth $50 to me?

~~~
jopt
Probably none. What advantage does a house have over a trailer if I don't care
about space/heating and how is that worth $n to me?

------
revelation
Is there a single piece of information in here? It reads like another pitch,
and I frankly don't think HN has been lacking in the "app.net" coverage
department.

I think the founders should be more actively looking for funding on other
channels, if they want to fill up that bar. HN seems like a saturated market.

~~~
huggyface
This 'startup' is one of those things on HN that really leaves me scratching
my head, sure that there must be much more that I'm missing. Is this really
it?

And to Gruber's pitch, is it because he has a vested interest, financially? Is
his "backing" that he pitches it for others to financially contribute?

~~~
1as
One of the nicest things about Apple products is the simplicity of the
underlying business model: you get hardware (most generally, also some
software and services like AppleCare) from them, and you give them money in
return. I think Gruber is a fan of this approach.

Apple's brand and future success then depends on you loving the product, which
means they spend a lot of the money you've given them on hiring smart and
dedicated people to build more loveable products. It's a virtuous cycle.

But most web-era companies (like Google and Facebook) have adopted a different
business model: you get their product for free, with the trade-off being that
you have to look at a few ads here and there.

The problem with this approach is that they end up hiring more smart and
dedicated people to work on advertising techniques, sales, UI, algorithms, &c.
than those who actually work on building ever more loveable product. (And they
might even IPO at a high valuation, putting even more pressure on the company
to deliver advertising revenue growth.)

App.net is trying to get back to the virtuous cycle of people paying for nice
products – that has been the standard in commerce since the beginning – so
that they can concentrate on making a great, benign product as opposed to
spending the future fretting about 'monetization' (think about how awkward
that word really is!) or advertising.

It's a trend I'd love to see more of, and I hope that everybody here gives
backing a second thought.

EDIT 1: Gruber obviously carries some sway, the total grew by $1850 in the
last 10 minutes.

EDIT 2: To continue the above, the total grew by $15000 in the last 2 hours.

~~~
huggyface
_you get hardware (most generally, also some software and services like
AppleCare) from them, and you give them money in return_

Is it so simple? Does anyone actually believe that Apple considers the
transaction complete when you walk away with your shiny new Apple device?

They want to be your content middleman. They want to force you to shop in
their store. They want to push the iAds service. I get emails from Apple
pushing books and movies and iPads for universities and so on literally
nightly. They have a store full of apps trying to foist smurfberries on the
kids of unsuspecting parents naive enough to implement an App Store passwords.

I like the general concept -- I was one of the earliest and most fervent
proponents of micropayments as opposed to advertising driven sites -- but the
dichotomy presented is false. Businesses don't act like that. I pay my cable
company for cable and they keep sending me magazine subscriptions. I buy a
$40,000 car and they try to foist services (XM Radio, OnStar) on me, and then
they try to sell the data about me to interested parties.

The world is a very complex place. Twitter and Google wouldn't exist without
their users, and anyone who pushes the simplistic "if you aren't paying you're
the product being sold" line has a position that only has merit if you don't
actually think about it for long.

Of course Gruber carries weight, which is why I asked about his personal
"investment" in this -- he seems to essentially be putting his reputation
behind something that is almost certain to fail.

~~~
reedlaw
Who actually _likes_ getting magazines from the cable company or car
dealerships foisting other services? Isn't there room for a different kind of
business model? Vimeo is a good example. Unlike Youtube, Vimeo doesn't
advertise and charges users for premium service. And for a certain types of
content producers that makes it a much more attractive platform. Hence you
generally see artistic works with high quality standards there vs. attention-
grabbing fluff.

------
soapdog
Why is app.net better than identi.ca? Honest question, I am curious

~~~
tree_of_item
Because it makes Dalton Caldwell money. At least, that's the reason Caldwell
would give you.

If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where
users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on
status.net, or at least something open source.

~~~
kposehn
> If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where
> users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on
> status.net, or at least something open source.

I disagree.

When making a business, your paying customer is the one you serve. If App.net
goes for charging users and developers, they'll (logically) focus on those
exact people.

~~~
AznHisoka
I disagree with your disagreement. Caldwell just wants to make money (and the
glory) Nothing wrong with that. I want to make money too first and foremost :)

~~~
kposehn
Hah!

I'm more disagreeing with the notion that a product can't be for
users/developers if he is charging them for it.

There is of course nothing wrong with making money :D

