
Announcing the App.net File API - anu_gupta
http://blog.app.net/2013/01/28/announcing-the-app-net-file-api/
======
teawithcarl
Dalton is very patient, damn frugal, and smart. His API programming team is
off-the-charts talented (essentially 14 Stanford and Carnegie Mellon guys),
and here's the important part - they get along very, very well. So, the team
is tight, and thinking long term.

They've got a rock-solid cash position, and I wouldn't be surprised for Marc
Andreessen to re-invest after 2 years, just to own a piece of this flex
infrastructure for such a small $ amount.

Today's announcement is exactly what's next. Building more ways to "roll your
own social network". The API is amazingly rich - the developers love it.

For example, messaging is far beyond Twitter's broken DM mechanism. The API
allows you to DEFINE messaging protocols, and uniquely build a social network
with a distinct message system. It's software-definable, via the API.

What's actually happened in the first 5-1/2 months is that the "core API" is
finally finished. They've actually unbundled all the core social 2.0
infrastructures.

Watch for more creative "edge API" ideas (like this social Dropbox) to come
out, now that the core team of 14 is freeing up to invent.

------
brianwillis
Let me speak in App.net's defense and say that I'm really enjoying the
service. I know that's not really a popular opinion around here, but there it
is.

Yes it has a stupid name, yes it has fewer users than twitter/facebook, and
yes it's hard to articulate to your non-tech friends why they should spend
$36/year on this. But it's becoming a pretty positive place to hang out, and
most of the people I care about listening to are there.

In practical terms, this file API means that if you want to post a picture you
don't have to use yet another here-today-gone-tomorrow photo sharing service
with no revenue model, which I would hope means there's a better chance of
your photos sticking around permanently (or at least as permanently as
anything ever gets on the web).

~~~
vineet
> yes it's hard to articulate to your non-tech friends why they should spend
> $36/year on this.

Actually, I am a tech person, and I like to support App.net. I have not yet
seen a reason to use the service.

> ...it's becoming a pretty positive place to hang out, and most of the people
> I care about listening to are there.

Ok. This is genuinely the first benefit I have heard about using it. Great.
Please elaborate more. (I say this as someone looking for reasons to support
App.net.)

~~~
pablasso
There's people on App.net that he finds interesting to read, there's nothing
to elaborate.

I participate a lot less on App.net, but I also find the community quite
enjoyable, it looks like twitter circa 2007, mostly with opinionated tech
people around.

------
jmathai
Curious how this any different than uploading your photos to Facebook and
using apps which integrate with the Graph API to access your photos?

I get that App.net charges users money but I'm often baffled by that being
misconstrued into users somehow having more control and ownership of their
content. Specifically, how's that make my content portable?

Disclaimer: I'm the lead dev/founder of OpenPhoto and our claims are similar
but we're open source and let users specify what storage service they want to
user with our service.

~~~
jazzychad
> Curious how this any different than uploading your photos to Facebook...

Technically it's not: app developers are using another service to handle file
storage. However, the difference lies in the promise from app.net that they
won't arbitrarily shut off your app because they feel like it or because it
somehow competes with their own service. Facebook has introduced fear into
their developer ecosystem that they can't be trusted to build a popular
product on top of. App.net is saying, "you can trust us, we are an
infrastructure company..." like Amazon.

> Specifically, how's that make my content portable?

I suppose it doesn't. Any file storage service has some amount of lock-in, but
people can create tools to import/export data to and from different services.
Unless you have all of your data stored locally on harddrives in your house,
you will have to use some service and trust their level of non-evilness.

OpenPhoto offers S3, Dropbox, and local storage out of the box (which is
awesome), but even if I want to switch storage providers, I'm going to incur a
switching cost (mostly paid with time to export/import).

~~~
jmathai
I'm only mentioning OpenPhoto for philosophical reasons as I think these two
services solve entirely different problems.

We support S3, Dropbox, CX, Box.com, DreamObjects and local file system. Two
of which were contributed by the community. The point being, this list isn't
controlled by any single person or entitiy.

> However, the difference lies in the promise from app.net that they won't
> arbitrarily shut off your app because they feel like it or because it
> somehow competes with their own service.

Perhaps I'm in the minority that doesn't trust promises of a company with
valuable data (photos, for me). If it's not valuable data then why care at all
(my tweets).

> I'm going to incur a switching cost

For hosted accounts we provide a migration option. All your photos are
seamlessly moved from Dropbox to S3 and all your links and mobile apps work as
they always have. <http://i.imgur.com/wWUc5uA.png>

That being said, someone should write an App.net file system adapter for
OpenPhoto :).

------
heyitsnick
As I haven't seen an App.net thread on HN for a while, and i've never really
"stumbled" across app.net status updates or mentions, a question to its users:
how's it been? Has the community and ecosystem grown? Do you plan to maintain
your subscription for the foreseeable future? Do you see value in maintaining
a corporate presence on the service?

~~~
ErikHuisman
It's not going great judging by this list of new users per day..
<http://appnetizens.com/nupd>

"Turns out App.net currently has approximately 20,000 users, of which a small
minority seemingly dominates the conversation: Basch estimates that 250 users
(1.25 percent) have so far accounted for half the posts."
[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/09/07/off-slow-
start-...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/09/07/off-slow-start-one-
month-in-250-app-net-users-account-half-activity/)

So once every 3-4 days a new active user is born..

~~~
jyap
Ah, that Appnetizens link is a very interesting one.

30,827 users * $36/year = $1.1 yearly revenue.

It should be interesting when the yearly subscription dates come up in August.
18,255 users are up for renewal in August. Well over half the user base.

Then subscription numbers will stabilize and App.net will need to deal with
issues such as user base churn.

------
graue
What makes this different from Dropbox, which already has an API[1] and paid
plans?

> _In this world, your photos are held in a data store controlled by you. If
> you want to try out a new service, you can seamlessly login and choose to
> give permission to that service, and the photos that you have granted access
> to would be immediately available._

All of this is already possible.

[1]: <https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/api>

------
charlieok
This looks like exactly the lines the fellows at Unhosted [1] have been
thinking along. They're working with the remoteStorage protocol [2].

If you're interested in this notion of decoupling storage from apps, I
encourage you to check these out. Dare I hope that app.net is planning to work
with this community?

    
    
      [1] https://unhosted.org/
      [2] http://remotestorage.io/

------
kzahel
This is interesting. If you made a good API for resumable uploading and had
nice oauth and signup procedures as well as apps for mobile ala google drive
for accessing the files, I could see some people using this as a file storage
backend.

------
jdolitsky
If anyones looking for a quick open source project, we need to update our
project to support the new API update:
<https://github.com/jdolitsky/AppDotNetPHP>

~~~
jmathai
If you get support for the file upload APIs you can ping me as we have
considered adding App.net support to OpenPhoto
(<https://github.com/photo/frontend>)

------
habosa
File storage? I feel like App.net should be trying for something a little more
ambitious. I'm sure this is a very developer friendly solution to file
uploading, but I don't really need a new storage service.

------
adjin
the funny thing is twitter or facebook could become a paid service anytime if
it sees this as a threat. and people will pay for it

~~~
camus
are you kidding ? users will never pay for twitter or facebook. As soon as
facebook/twitter is a paid service people will leave it and find for
alternatives. For paid APIs that's a different story but nothing is eternal on
the internet.

~~~
csense
If payment is made mandatory for those apps, it'll kill them. But making
payment an option that enables more features or services would be a great
business model for them (and less prone to backlash than selling users'
privacy or plastering your site with intrusive ads).

~~~
fields
The question is - would paying them prevent them from mining your data, or
just stop showing you ads?

