
Dalton Caldwell: We Did It - J-H
http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it
======
therealarmen
Congratulations to Dalton and the entire team at App.net! They deserve every
penny.

Dalton's steely resolve through this entire process has been an inspiration to
me; it takes a lot of guts to go out on a limb and ignore all the haters. Even
if App.net as a platform doesn't take off I still consider this project a
success.

~~~
zerostar07
Naive question, but how do we know they deserve every penny?

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jenius
I would like to publicly admit my total wrongness and congratulate Dalton on
his success with this project. You have won my backing and I'll be there
'apping' with the rest of you guys.

This was the somewhat popular but incorrect comment I made previously:
<http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4278378>

Much love. Props.

~~~
walkon
> I'll be there 'apping'

Let's hope this doesn't become a verb. Tweeting is bad enough, but "apping"?

~~~
jyap
It will be called "tweeting on app.net".

~~~
walkon
Twapping?

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julian37
Congratulations from me, too! A very impressive result in such a short
timeframe.

In danger of asking a silly question, I do wonder about this bit though:

 _In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our
data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that
the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner._

I might not be seeing the forest for the trees here, but how would anybody
actually go about doing that? If you don't release identifying information
(which I assume would include names, credit card numbers, and so on) how would
anybody be able to verify?

I'm not, in the slightest, implying there was any wrongdoing, I have no reason
to believe that App.net is inflating any numbers or isn't "operated in an
honest manner". I'm just genuinely curious to know how it would be possible to
independently vet that all transactions were legit (or whatever it is you're
trying to prove).

Am I correct to assume that the best anybody could do would be to say that
"the numbers looks right"? Or maybe something like "the amount of money
transferred via Stripe to App.net is in the right ballpark"? If people can do
better, how so? Again, genuine question.

~~~
darkandbrooding
What follows is a layman just "thinking out loud." (But isn't that what Sunday
afternoons are for?) When I use the term "auditor" I'm implying "employees at
a firm" rather than "a single individual."

What App.net desires is for a trusted third party to say, "Yep, they're
legit." So first, you would select an auditor who has a good reputation
financially, technically, and ethically. Presumably, you'd line up a couple of
secondary sources to publicly reinforce the auditor's reputation and bless the
auditor's methodology.

It's been literally decades since I took any accounting classes, but I think
you would _need_ to follow the entire chain of some transactions, and this
would necessitate showing real investor/customer data at some point. If you
can secure that investor's/customer's permission, then sharing the data
becomes a non-issue. How you get that permission becomes the issue.

If your auditor's reputation is strong enough, their name alone may be
sufficient to secure permission. But you can also take steps to create a
"security narrative" designed to put the investor/customer at ease.

You'd need to give the auditor access to your data, while preventing the
possibility that they could leak this data. So the auditor would work in your
offices, on your machines.

You'd provide laptops so that you can disable all peripheral ports. You'd
secure the laptops to the table. The machines would have no optical drives.
Those machines would net boot, have wired LAN access but not WAN, and no
wireless access at all. They would run the software the auditors required but
nothing else.

You'd confiscate phones and cameras from the auditors before they entered your
audit environment. You could go a little crazy and record video of the
auditors at work, with cameras angled so that you can see what notes the
auditors are taking but not what screen they're looking at while they're
taking notes. You could go a lot crazy and prove that the auditors are not
sitting in front of any windows, thereby exposing data to high powered lenses
across the street.

You could sanitize the data your auditors see, so that the auditor initially
sees "Backer N" or "Vendor Y" instead of an actual person or company name.

Armed with some variation of the above security narrative, when the auditor
says "I'd like to talk to backer N or vendor Y," you can present that
narrative to the backer or vendor to secure their permission for auditor
access to the information. I wouldn't be surprised if the average backer gets
impatient and grants permission well before you're done explaining the
security narrative.

------
dangrossman
Did Svbtle change its font recently? The text looks terrible. It's blurry,
poorly aliased and some of the letters have full-out gaps in the strokes.

When viewed in Windows, of course.

~~~
dwynings
Yes, it used to be Proxima Nova served with Typekit.

~~~
sp332
My browser (FF on Win7) still renders as Proxima Nova.

~~~
dwynings
Yep, it's been changed back. =)

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guscost
Congratulations!! Incredibly excited, still waiting for that killer app.

EDIT: I purchased it weeks ago, but you get the idea...

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xwowsersx
Just completed the sign-up, but still get "We don't recognize that username.
This is probably because you haven't been invited to our alpha yet. To request
an invitation, please email join@app.net." when I try logging in.

~~~
quartus
xwowsersx, please send an email to join@app.net and we'll get you set up with
your login information. The backing process and the alpha.app.net access are
not automated yet, we still need to grant your user access to the alpha.

~~~
xwowsersx
Done, thanks.

------
RandallBrown
I'm glad they're going to have someone verify it. It seemed really strange to
me that they rolled their own crowd funding platform for one use.

Why didn't they go with a third party like Kickstarter in the first place?

~~~
ralfd
There is a FAQ on the site. It says:

> Why aren't you using Kickstarter?

> We wish we could, we <3 Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter Terms Of
> Service explicitly prohibits raising money for this kind of service.

~~~
RandallBrown
Diaspora used Kickstarter to raise money. Lots of other similar software
projects have. Just seems weird to me.

------
kirillzubovsky
Congrats. Looking forward to joining the alpha. Interestingly enough, I was
skeptical about App.net before I paid the $$, but now I am all excited about
it. Maybe you've got something going there :D

------
ch
Well I admit it. I drank the Kool-Aid. Partly to grab my twitter handle, not
that I think it was in any danger of being scooped, and partly to see just
what is happening on the inside of the walled garden.

I can't comment any further, my password I signed up with doesn't seem to
work, and the password reset feature also appears broken :) I will reserve
judgement for now.

~~~
FireBeyond
You definitely did drink the Kool-Aid:

"I paid for a product, I can't login, and I can't fix things so I can login.
But I'll meekly 'reserve judgment' rather than lambasting what should be a
fairly important issue."

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bslatkin
Bets on how soon someone will imitate this approach to the platform business
in other areas?

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briandear
>>There has been zero manipulation of numbers, or “stuffing of the ballot box”
by App.net.

Why would he even suggest that? I wouldn't have expected such behavior.

~~~
jmonegro
Some people suggested this would happen, see:
<https://twitter.com/aaronsw/status/234628499690885120>

------
j_s
Mission Accomplished!

------
rorrr
I watched the video, and I still don't know what app.net is. "Social platform"
is all I got, that's extremely vague.

~~~
citricsquid
Twitter, that you pay for, that has no adverts and that is developer friendly
with the API.

I think that's a good summary: <https://alpha.app.net/>

~~~
jschlesser
I think thats a narrow short term view of it but easy to assume given the
surface information. Messages need to be succinct and understandable in
familiar contexts and i think Ost of the opinions are based on 'ad free
twitter' which isnt the big excitement in the app.net community. Im cross
posting. Im a supporter but not an employee. I have read a lot more in depth
and here is my take. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373394>

