
Here's Why People Are Backing App.net - jonmwords
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/heres-why-people-are-backing-appnet.php
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ghshephard
Any time I can transition a service that is important to me to one in which
_I_ am the customer, I grab that opportunity quickly.

I'd happily pay gmail $10/month for mail in which I was the customer, and not
the advertisers. $4/month for a user supported twitter environment sounds like
a bargain - particularly as all the people I suspect I want to "follow" (or
whatever the join.app.net terminology will be) - have already pledged their
support for app.net.

~~~
spindritf
> I'd happily pay gmail $10/month for mail in which I was the customer

It's only $5/user/month and they offer a free trial. No ads, of course, and a
SLA.

<http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html>

~~~
ghshephard
Yup - gordon@shephard.org has been going to Google Apps for at least 4+ years
@$50/year - My break point is about $10/month (or $120/year) - particularly as
I get the fairly awesome 2-factor auth from Google.

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vandershraaf
(I'm saying this from a regular user's perspective and not developer): First
of all, what's boggling my mind about this app.net thingy is the vague pitch
and description. They should explain themselves first as "a paid social
network where users own their own data and without any ad disturbance". Then
they can elaborate more stuff. I really had hard time to comprehend the
importance of this yet-another-social network and spent a lot of time reading
others' people blog/HN posts just to understand what it is all about.

Secondly, I see why they charge for it for access; I mean, we are customers
when we pay for it. I get it. However, I still don't think people are willing
to pay for it. Social network will forever (well may be not, but we'll see) be
free because when the stuff is free, we can be sure that we can allure our
close friends, relatives, or whoever in our circles to join the social
network, thus the social network itself. Even more so when regular users are
pretty content with the existing free social networks we have. If there are
less users in a social network, the less motivation any developer to develop
application on its platform.

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debacle
<https://join.app.net/>

People aren't backing join.app.net. Are they really going to find 300k in a
week, when they have raised only just half that after such a long time?

~~~
sylvinus
Yes, I really wonder how much blogspam and artificial HN buzz they have to
make before acknowledging that people are just not interested.

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joebadmo
App.net strikes me as a half-measure. It's still a centralized system with one
company acting ultimately as a gatekeeper.

I want a twitter that acts more like email, on open, distributed systems that
leave me in full ownership of my own content. I see very little reason for
something like Twitter to go through a centralized party this way.

~~~
stcredzero
_> It's still a centralized system with one company acting ultimately as a
gatekeeper._

USENET was pretty decentralized. If that could me made to update faster, it
could be the basis for a decentralized Twitter-like service.

~~~
wmf
The "everyone caches everything" economics of Usenet are all wrong for the
modern Internet, though.

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1as
I backed this almost immediately, and expected them to be a lot closer to the
goal than they are now (still more than $300,000 off with only seven days to
go). I'm very surprised with the apparent lack of resonance with the idea from
people around here.

So what are some of the reasons you aren't backing?

~~~
smacktoward
The problem with App.net (as it's currently described, anyway) is that it's
halfway between what people who love Twitter want and what people who hate
Twitter want, which makes it less than an obvious sale for both.

People who love Twitter want... Twitter. App.net doesn't interoperate with
Twitter; it's another, separate silo. There's no guarantees that your Twitter
friends will move to App.net with you, which limits the appeal if you live in
Twitter.

People who hate Twitter hate it for a variety of reasons. App.net doesn't
address most of these. If you hate Twitter because they kneecapped their
developers, guess what, there's no guarantees App.net won't kneecap their
developers five years from now either. If you hate Twitter because it's a
centralized, proprietary system, guess what, App.net is centralized and
proprietary too. If you hate Twitter because of its scaling problems, guess
what, there's no guarantees that App.net (which, as noted, is as centralized
as Twitter is) will be any better at dealing with that stuff. And so forth.

Personally, I fall into the latter category; I have _lots_ of problems with
Twitter. But nothing about App.net screams to me that here is the solution to
those problems. Instead it just feels like Twitter with a different owner and
a subscription fee -- which are just about the only ways at this point you
could take the idea of Twitter and make it _less_ appealing to me.

~~~
jonmwords
The guarantee that App.net won't kneecap its developers is that its developers
are paying customers.

~~~
streptomycin
If a service doesn't kneecap its developers, yet those developers have no
userbase because nobody uses the service, does it make a sound?

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pg_bot
I don't think this project will work due to several inherent economic factors.
If I understand correctly app.net takes a free service (twitter, fb) has
removed the best features of those services and then wants to charge money for
that product. Dalton has put himself in the position of a reverse browser war
which doesn't seem very viable to me.

~~~
nicksergeant
Well, somebody has to do something, right? He's just trying something.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Why does somebody have to do something? Twitter has made some controversial
moves recently but the only people they've really annoyed are developers.
Users have had no major problems. Why would tens of millions of people start
paying for something they already get free and like? I think that this project
is a response to the developer community Twitter has annoyed but there is no
real market for it. A quick look at how little backing it's got shows that it
isn't really needed.

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thomasbk
They could run it from a non-profit instead of a private company. Would be an
interesting experiment!

~~~
m_p_wilcox
How many instances of groups of very smart people with a great product vision
and the technical ability to deliver it are there that set up non-profit
companies to give us all their brain-child for free? I'd prefer it if they
wanted to do it in a non-profit and give all the excess revenue to 3rd party
devs but this is much better than waiting for a unicorn to turn up.

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jameszol
I like Twitter. I don't mind the ads. And Twitter is close to letting us
download our own archived tweets: [http://searchengineland.com/twitter-tweet-
archive-tool-comin...](http://searchengineland.com/twitter-tweet-archive-tool-
coming-128537)

If ads interrupted my experience, then maybe it would become a pain point
worth addressing or paying for. Until then, I'll stick with the free, ad-
supported Twitter.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Ads are not the problem, the problem is the implications of being ad-
supported. How it affects policy and decision-making.

~~~
jameszol
Is that implication really a problem though? I suppose for some it is. That
audience is likely quite small, depending on the service of course.

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kmfrk
It seems like a weird decision that they don't stick to the 140-character
limit.

~~~
timdorr
They're not making a Twitter clone, they're just cloning some of the features
of networks like Twitter and Facebook.

~~~
k-mcgrady
The 140 character limit is important though. It's necessary for the service to
work over SMS which is hugely important to users in many developing countries.
It's also been the key to twitters success in various uprisings in the middle
east when internet access was shut down.

