

Developer-friendly Twitter alternative App.net hits 100K registered users - DiabloD3
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/17/developer-friendly-twitter-alternative-app-net-hits-100000-registered-users-9-months-after-launch/

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frostmatthew
There was a good post recently how what attention App.net has received has
been focused on Alpha instead of the platform and how much of a marketing fail
that was <https://medium.com/future-tech-future-market/81dd36429f47>

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ibudiallo
It is interesting, just a couple of days ago i asked this:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5715431>

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norswap
App.net is just like twitter at the beginning: I don't understand what it's
for.

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chipsy
Here is my answer.

App.net has positioned itself as "anti" - capturing the developers who were
turned away from other social networks. That's OK as a starting point, but it
doesn't account for growth to 100k users. So who are those users?

And I think the answer is: they're users that would have done business
directly with the outcast developers and their products, rather than App.net.
App.net is a new kind of middleman.

There are types of social networking services that would be suitable for
subscription fees, and ordinarily each of those devs would have the option of
building out their own infrastructure, or trying to cram their idea into the
second-class citizenship of a Facebook or Twitter, with all the risks that
entails. But hooking themselves to App.net gives them a mix of the two options
- more freedom, less bootstrapping.

So there's a massive positive feedback loop associated with getting developers
on App.net - the same kind of feedback loop that made Microsoft in its best
years so developer-centric.

The downside is that everyone's going to be heavily locked in. The endgame for
this ecosystem isn't likely to be pretty.

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waltz
App.net is just a cool name.

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mattdeboard
And this is exactly why the mods here change titles. Original headline of this
submission was "Developer-friendly Twitter killer..."

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DiabloD3
And this is why submitters complain about title changing by mods. I was
keeping the spirit of the original headline, mod removed "in 9 months" in
favor of "alternative". I think mentioning it was done in 9 months is
important.

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ricardobeat
100k users after 9 months doesn't usually warrant a headline, and barely
tickles twitter's user base.

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nasalgoat
100K in a month, that would be newsworthy.

