

App.net Response to Brennan Novak, part II - aaronpk
http://blog.app.net/2013/08/07/response-to-brennan-novak-part-ii/

======
lkrubner
If the goal is to build a paid for blogging platform, it seems to me that
App.net is doing all of the right things (or perhaps the goal is paid for live
chat rooms, since they also seem able to support that). The infrastructure so
far seems impressive, and Dalton has been transparent and highly communicative
about much of what App.net is doing.

The only thing missing from all of this is for someone like Dalton to actually
say "We are building a paid blogging platform." When App.net was initially
described, it sounded like "This will be just like Twitter, but you will pay
for it." And that never made sense.

It seems to me they now have the infrastructure to support several business
models that people might actually pay for (blogs, private chat rooms, etc) but
if anyone at App.net has said what the intended business model is, then I
missed the announcement.

~~~
terhechte
The Twitter thing was kind of a misunderstanding. App.net, as far as I
understood it, wants to be a paid platform for a variety of applications. Just
that they won't show ads, and they won't remove features, cripple features, or
limit the API in order to serve advertising or monetary interests.

They're trying to implement something where you sign up once, as a user, and
you can use multiple _apps_ on top of it, and in all these apps you'll have
the same data (your friends, messages, etc), yet unlike facebook, they're not
blocking apps or limiting the API or putting adds in your news stream, or
deliberately removing friends' posts from your news stream so that others have
to pay in order to appear in your stream again.

~~~
AznHisoka
"The Twitter thing was kind of a misunderstanding"

Didn't Dalton market App.net as a response to Twitter rate limits and taking
away features?

By making a paid API, he's essentially moving in the right step. But there's 1
problem: his system will never have the data that a network like Twitter or FB
has. What good is a paid search API when I'll only get 10 "tweets" a min?

~~~
terhechte
Twitter was the prime example of an API that was good, and had promised to
become even better, and then - due to internal pivot towards more marketing
and advertising - became crippled. What Dalton tried to say was, create a
platform that could be everything, and it'll never become crippled.

Also, this idea stems from a time, a couple of years ago, where some people
used to consider twitter a sort of data platform and not a social media
platform. The fantastic api allowed people to hack together gadgets that used
the twitter api to communicate with other gadgets, people used it as an api
channel for real time chess games, etc. That's what Twitter, the platform, was
in the eyes of many people. While Twitter nowadays sees itself as something
entirely different. In the platform-kind-of-way, the tweets are not imporant,
they're only one example of what could be done on top of the API.

~~~
yapcguy
App.net is/was DOA. Dalton managed to con(vince) a bunch of developers to fork
over money, but really, nobody cares what happens to App.net because the
platform is proprietary and not open-source.

~~~
neuroscr
So open-standards don't matter? While they haven't given their source for
their backend, they've been pretty open about how it's built, plus they've
open sourced several pieces of their platform (Omega, Pourover, Ohe).

App.net is for the general consumer that's not going to be able to run their
own server stack. If you can run your own server stack, you can use all these
open standards outlined in this blog posts to consume the data and do what you
like.

There's even a [http://dev-lite.jonathonduerig.com/](http://dev-
lite.jonathonduerig.com/) so you don't need to pay anything to tinker with
their API.

------
chrisduesing
Can someone clarify this for me. It seems like they are openly publishing to a
number of formats, which presumably(?) don't require an app.net account to
access. Does this mean that they are defacto turning it in to a pay to publish
(rather than pay to subscribe) platform?

~~~
neuroscr
I would say no. Free accounts are limited to following 40 accounts but are
unlimited in followers. Which means publishers don't have to pay anything to
have a large following. But a subscriber may have to pay if they wish to
consume a lot of the content.

~~~
chrisduesing
But if they are publishing each user's feed to RSS, then you don't need an
app.net account to subscribe to more than 40 users. Or am I missing something?

~~~
neuroscr
Well, you don't get to use the handy apps with the cool UIs the 3rd party devs
have made. But yea, I suppose you can consume it all on your own too.

------
brennannovak
I think it's pretty great that Dalton implemented all his promises and then
some!

