Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware • Hacker News Board

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#81

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:24 PM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #59

ghshephard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people . Four of those six people have already voiced support for join.app.net ((Dan Benjamin, John Grueber, Marco Armenti, John Siracusa). I expect the other two would join fairly quickly, and, given the "open" nature of join.app.net, I expect anybody who wanted cross-posting from twitter over to join.app.net, wouldn't have much difficulty. Just have the client post on both…

Honest question: what stops you from simply browsing a twitter list of those twelve people? Or, more pragmatically: what incentive do I, a person who doesn't really care about 'openness' and uses Twitter for a billion other reasons anyway, have to pay $50 and subscribe to app.net instead of just following the twitter list of those twelve people?

The incentives are A) to hedge against future developments of Twitter throwing you under the bus for $0.50 and B) joining a social network of people who explicitly value that network who you believe will have a generally higher signal to noise ration than the unwashed masses.

Today you can follow those 12 people, but if this takes off then it promises a return to the nostalgic '06 and '07 of Twitter when the community was small and everyone there was "interesting". The cognoscenti of tech may well abandon Twitter in favor of this un-walled, membership-only garden.

Now who really should care about this? Certainly not most people. It won't compete with Twitter, but it won't have to because it will have a fraction of the infrastructure costs, and it will avoid the eternal september that plagues every popular free service. This will be a niche product, but if successful it will potentially be highly valuable to that niche, and also it will be quite novel as a paid product of this type has never taken off as far as I know. If you really buy into the hype, you might even think that the success of app.net could signal the high water mark of free services as it becomes apparent just how much better a service can be created when it's paid for directly by users.

I'm not saying I believe any of this, but I do see the potential.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#82

Post by rfouquet » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:26 PM UTC

badclient wrote: post #70

rfouquet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's not about the ads directly really. It's about the fact that the ads will dictate the fate of the service. To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. Just look at Twitter: in order to monetize, they will eventually block third party apps from using the service, which is bad for the users, because Twitter's own apps…

To survive, the service has to go where the customers (which are not the users, but the companies buying ad space) wants it to be. That is not entirely accurate either. In order to have any customers, even by your definition, twitter must continue to have lots of users. So there is already a checks and balance system of sorts in place such that if twitter goes too far in the direction of addressing advertisers while…

The vast majority of Twitter users today use the web interface or Twitter's own apps. These are ordinary people, not tech geeks. They don't care about APIs - they don't even know what that is. Twitter doesn't hurt them by restricting their service to their own apps. It's pretty unlikely that these people will ever want to pay $50 a year for a micro messaging service like app.net or care enough about not being a product, so they will never be the focus of app.net.

Twitter enjoys a tremendous popularity because of all those celebrities using the service. I mean celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, not like John Gruber. And that keeps the masses coming to Twitter. It does turn away the tech folks though, the people who used Twitter in its very beginning and which are now turned away by its politics.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#83

Post by webjprgm » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:28 PM UTC

quartus wrote: post #10

maxwin wrote: post #4

I think it's going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyone else, a social network with ads (that are not TOO annoying) is much better than one that ask for your money. He might be able to find enough people to pay to become a profitable business but I doubt he will ever reach facebook or twitter like scale. And if…

One thing to note is that our funding velocity is not linear, it has been picking up speed. If we can keep the momentum going and spread the word, we are confident that we will hit our goal. Regarding ads being not too annoying, people are backing app.net because of the larger goal: creating a service where the user is the customer rather than the product. This allows app.net to focus all of its resources on pleasing…

Would it work if the 3rd-party devs were the customers? I.e. anyone using XYZ's app gets in for free because XYZ company pays the usage fees (out of it's ad revenue). That would avoid app.net trying to shut down services that customers like. It would also improve user adoption since it's free to the user. But how does this model compare to the customer-centric one?

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#84

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:28 PM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #49

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your analysis, but it's worth noting that size/scale aren't everything. Hacker News isn't the size of Reddit (or Digg at its height) and I'm kind of glad about that. If App.Net ends up being the 'Hacker News Twitterlike' service, is that a success or failure?

The difference is that Hacker News doesn't need to turn a profit. app.net has a number of running costs that need to be serviced and, to do that, people have to want to pay. There is a minimum threshold that is required to keep users with the service, otherwise it feels empty. Examples are Google Wave vs Google+. The former felt empty and pointless, while the latter can be interesting because of the number of users,…

It's not a good example though, because no one knew what the hell to use Wave for anyway. It was just a conglomeration of product features that had no clear place to fit into existing workflows.

Twitter on the other hand fits in everywhere. People just love to crap out little 160 character nuggets in between everything else they do all day long.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#85

Post by elmuchoprez » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:29 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #28

maxwin wrote: post #4

I think it's going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyone else, a social network with ads (that are not TOO annoying) is much better than one that ask for your money. He might be able to find enough people to pay to become a profitable business but I doubt he will ever reach facebook or twitter like scale. And if…

I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people . Four of those six people have already voiced support for join.app.net ((Dan Benjamin, John Grueber, Marco Armenti, John Siracusa). I expect the other two would join fairly quickly, and, given the "open" nature of join.app.net, I expect anybody who wanted cross-posting from twitter over to join.app.net, wouldn't have much difficulty. Just have the client post on both…

John Siricusa blatantly stated that he funded it before even fully understanding what it was. His support was based on Marco and Grueber (among others) supporting it.

Marco is supporting it but has blatantly said he doesn't think it's going to work out.

Dan Benjamin has echoed Marco's statements and implied that he specifically bought in to reserve a specific user name, which I imagine is just a precaution to protect his business name on a potential new service.

And Grueber... I don't know. I haven't listened to him in a long time.

Anyways, I wouldn't call that overwhelming support. I think it's a lot of tail chasing from a few people.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#86

Post by klausa » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:33 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #28

maxwin wrote: post #4

I think it's going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyone else, a social network with ads (that are not TOO annoying) is much better than one that ask for your money. He might be able to find enough people to pay to become a profitable business but I doubt he will ever reach facebook or twitter like scale. And if…

I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people . Four of those six people have already voiced support for join.app.net ((Dan Benjamin, John Grueber, Marco Armenti, John Siracusa). I expect the other two would join fairly quickly, and, given the "open" nature of join.app.net, I expect anybody who wanted cross-posting from twitter over to join.app.net, wouldn't have much difficulty. Just have the client post on both…

Just a heads up - it's Marco Arment (no i on the end) and John Gruber (no umlaut, so no transliteration of ü to ue).

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#87

Post by SebMortelmans » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:49 PM UTC

Dalton stated he will return all the money if he does not raise the full amount.

Now why do I have the feeling that there is going to be a annex to that statement in a few days? He'll probably figure something out that allows him to (be allowed to) keep the money raised.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#88

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 10:53 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #66

m_p_wilcox wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics behind the app.net idea are way beyond mediocre. Charging users for a platform capable of hosting a wide range of apps and compensating developers with revenue share based on usage aligns everyone's interests with the users. The platform provides the best infrastructure and the app developers are incentivised to create lasting value for users, since they keep getting paid for as long as people keep usin…

Some of the smartest people in tech have supported a ton of failures. Every VC on the planet has a long list of "the next big thing" that never went anywhere. I don't necessarily care if some of the "smartest" people in tech are backing it. App.net has raised under $300,000 -- if it was THAT awesome, they would have raised the full $500K almost instantly. Fred Wilson would have just just wrote a check for the whole t…

Sure there's an anger component, but that's a low blow to call it Occupy. First of all, it's not an aimless protest at a "big company", it's anger about the fact that Twitter became a big company on the backs of these developers, but when it comes to monetize, turning into an ad company and shutting any threat to the ad revenue stream down is always the safe bet.

More importantly, it's not just a bunch of ideologues camped out on a lawn smoking weed. Dalton is making an assertion that the only way to make the service that the Twitter developers of 2006, 2007, 2008 signed up for, is to enshrine it in founding principles. This is because inevitably advertisers always outbid users.

Because of this, of course VCs aren't going to pony up the $500k. There's not that much upside for a VC. But that doesn't mean the service doesn't have value, it just means that value can't be captured the same way a billion-user free service can. However, the promise of stability means that for developers it is much less risky to build against, and they can create much more value. Some of that value maybe captured, some of it not, but just because no one is making a buck doesn't mean there isn't a tremendous amount of value being created.

Finally, the Kickstarter thing is critical to this project because it validates the idea itself. If a VC writes a check that proves nothing, but if 10,000 users promise $50 that is a critical mass right there. It's sort of like how public radio members drive the big contributions. No one is going to pay $50 for an empty social network, but if there are 10,000 quality people there you know there will be at least something interesting on day one.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#89

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 11:02 PM UTC

catenate wrote: post #69

Can anyone yet point to something done with app.net that twitter won't or can't do? $50 is a lot to pay for something that so far acts just like twitter. Without those new and interesting apps, which right now do appear to be vaporware, it's not worth a premium over twitter. I don't think clients that just show you the feed or your feed count, because twitter can do that.

What app.net can do is offer you as a developer the credible promise that whatever you build on it will not be shut down because it conflicts with business decisions made 1, 5 or 10 years from now.

This of course trickles down to the user, since you are virtually guaranteed that there will be new clients for as long as the service exists. With Twitter you are virtually guaranteed that no new client ideas will see the light of day unless they come from Twitter themselves, and those will all be designed to increase your usage of the service with any increased utility merely serving as the hook.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware

#90

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Aug 08, 2012, 11:15 PM UTC

jumpbug wrote: post #54

andrew_simone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be mediocre if it was simply an "open api" twitter/facebook but, given the chatter on the Alpha site and the look of the API on git ( https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec ), I think there is something bigger going on here.

Its a cool api, and I mean no disrespect to anybody involved like the guy said above, I just believe the business as a whole is a kneejerk reaction to a couple of well connected people and sites getting the rug pulled out from under them. It would be cool if they could get enough people to use it, but the API is only useful if there is useful data to pull from it.

It's not exactly a knee-jerk reaction to an isolated incident though. Twitter has been moving in the media company direction for a while now, and with the latest communications you can almost see the "fuck you developers" oozing out from between every line of shmarmy corporate-speak.

Any developer would be a fool now to build a product whose core relies on Twitter's API. And yet the core functionality of Twitter is an incredibly useful base to build on.

With App.net you don't have the volume of Twitter, but on the other hand you will presumably have a much higher signal to noise ratio. It won't be inundated with marketing spam, bot follows, and banal teen banter. And in any case, Twitter was small once too, and people found a use for it. I think a critical mass of 10,000 is definitely enough to enable some interesting apps.