151–160 of 191 posts
I went down this road once (http://www.odatahq.com/) and loved every minute of it. I still look at what we made and find true joy in it. But the end game was typical of most developer platforms ...
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Open sourcing, data export and a 2 months notice forward are pretty respectful in my book. I wish these where standard procedures for the industry.
On the flip side, it was users demanding free service (under which I include gracious data export) that killed the product in the first place. I hope we find a way to pay for this stuff more than I hope getting it free becomes standard.
The primary memory which I have of that era are people not wanting to pay for something which wasn't clearly useful, shrugging, and going back to Twitter where most other people were. By the time app.net finally launched the free tier the self-inflicted damage was already fatal.
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Open sourcing, data export and a 2 months notice forward are pretty respectful in my book. I wish these where standard procedures for the industry.
On the flip side, it was users demanding free service (under which I include gracious data export) that killed the product in the first place. I hope we find a way to pay for this stuff more than I hope getting it free becomes standard.
The moment they allowed free accounts was the start of the end. The spam and the noise came. All the things we were trying to avoid. But they just wanted beefier numbers to throw around.
I developed quite a few apps on the platform and made a few thousand in the process. It more than paid the fees back and was totally worth it.
I wonder if the code base that they open source will become the basis for another decentralized social network?
You need both for your project to succeed. This should not be underestimated.
The nice thing is that if your platform is decentralized, hosting is a non-issue and you just have to focus on adoption.
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Which is a lesson in how VC can easily destroy a viable, profitable business with a "money-chasing-money" strategy.
How do you figure that? 1) VCs own hardly any shared of Twitter[1] 2) Stock grants are used as compensation for people working at Twitter, NOT something that benefits investors (except in the sense people are working at the company the investors invested in I guess). It's easy to blame VCs for everything, but I don't see how this makes any sense at all in this case. [1] http://www.recode.net/2016/8/11/12417064/twitte…
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My sentiment exactly. And I agree with Dalton it was worth trying to see if it could fly. It raises a lot of interesting questions about the sustainability of the "app economy" for me.
I appreciate both of your sentiments, thank you. I continue to be at least somewhat optimistic that non ad-supported models are worth trying. It seems like Patreon is doing really well and is perhaps something we can all learn from.
We sort of took the tortoise approach to development, and this seems to have helped solve the chicken and egg problem with the userbase.
I will email you about it.
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It provided a check? How?
If people were dissatisfied with Twitter, they could leave and join App.net. If enough people did this and App.net reached critical mass, it could have become the default service of its kind. Since the primary motivation for people switching to App.net was them getting upset at Twitter, they slowed down the frequency and breadth of the changes they were making to their service so as to upset fewer people and less fre…
Except they couldn't. They had to be invited or pay for it. In those days circa 2012, it was a hype train among a niche crowd.
So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twi…
Twitter has no issue making money: They made over a billion last year. Their problem is in growing: They have about the same users they had 2 years ago.
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I have no idea why anyone even likes Twitter. Beyond broadcasting, there is nothing of value on it. Every tweet has absolutely inane replies. You can at least find some half-decent commentary in Facebook post comments, but Twitter is just insane babble
How a social platform looks like to any given person depends on the people that person associates with. If twitter is inane babble to you that says more about what you did with twitter than about twitter itself.
And anytime I've looked at anything remotely political, I had to take a bath afterwards