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App.net funded with $500,000.

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Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#41
Credit Stephen Fry for probably at least $10k of that — he told his 4 million followers about the service, which pushed it over the edge: https://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/234695539357257728

Seriously though, this is great. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next. Hoping to experiment on the journalism front there.

Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#43
post #8

Not that I'm accusing Dalton of doing this, but when croudfunding without using a platform like kickstarter, it might be too easy to fake backer numbers in order to meet the goal or inflate popularity. What this means for the future: Companies will announce croudfunding and then fake amazing numbers in order to appear popular and gain lots of press. I can see the headline now: "ACME Software raises $3 million in firs…

It's an interesting point, if you look at the video statistics it has only had 31,000 plays which means for every 4 people that watch the video at least 1 spends $50. However, Stripe has access to their payment info so it's possible to prove whether or not this is faked. Actually, that's an interesting question: would it be fraud to fake the last $xxx,xxx of a crowd sourcing drive?

I backed the project without watching the video. The posts on sites like DaringFireball and Marco.org had already convinced me. I doubt I'm the only one.

Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#44

A centralized social network is what's wrong. Despite their best intentions they're still going to have all their users and developers by the balls. This absolutely will not replace Facebook or Twitter, it'll be just another one of the dozens of copycats like Path. What really needs to happen is an open decentralized protocol needs to be agreed upon for newsfeeds + blog posts (wordpress) + microblog (twitter). Then e…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet

Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#45

A centralized social network is what's wrong. Despite their best intentions they're still going to have all their users and developers by the balls. This absolutely will not replace Facebook or Twitter, it'll be just another one of the dozens of copycats like Path. What really needs to happen is an open decentralized protocol needs to be agreed upon for newsfeeds + blog posts (wordpress) + microblog (twitter). Then e…

The reason that no one has managed to make a proper decentralised version of Twitter is that it's really, really hard - much harder than saying "what really needs to happen is..."

Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we'll definitely see a lot of attempts, but I don't know if many will have much success. It's very similar to Louis C.K.'s online video. While his video was successful, it only worked because he'd already established a name for himself. Other, lesser known, comedians will have a hard time replicating that because they don't have the brand already. If first-time entrepreneurs try and use crowd-funding, I just…

That's true for every type of funding, though.

But the big difference is the traditional investment model requires fewer backers. While by no means is raising investment an easy process, first time entrepreneurs have a better chance since they have to sell fewer people on it.

Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#49
post #8

Not that I'm accusing Dalton of doing this, but when croudfunding without using a platform like kickstarter, it might be too easy to fake backer numbers in order to meet the goal or inflate popularity. What this means for the future: Companies will announce croudfunding and then fake amazing numbers in order to appear popular and gain lots of press. I can see the headline now: "ACME Software raises $3 million in firs…

See this: http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

Re: App.net funded with $500,000.

#50

I'm genuinely surprised, I didn't believe it would make it this far. I've backed it and I really hope it delivers, it's going to be very interesting to see how this turns out. I feel sceptical (because the value in Twitter is the people, not the platform) but I was also sceptical that this would ever reach $100,000, let alone $500,000, so clearly any assumptions previously made are wrong.

It could be a lot of curiosity that drove it.

Now I can see a problem arising if they take outside investment.

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