The money part of App.net is a red herring
alexhillman.com
The money part of App.net is a red herring
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#2At this point, it seems like there is more people talking about App.net than people potentially using it.
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#3At this point, it seems like there is more people talking about App.net than people potentially using it.
It's going to be a self-fulfilling conspiracy. All this talk about how it's gonna succeed, and how noone understands it.. sooner or later, some misled company like FB or Google will just acqui-hire App.net for millions of dollars because everyone is talking about it.
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#4So the author of this post can't see the reason why anyone would want to pay for this, and yet backed the project himself anyway?
It reminds me of the people you see who write forums posts like 'I just got my first Mac, now what?' when the answer is always 'do whatever you wanted it for in the first place'
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#5"By the way, I put my $50 in out of pure morbid curiosity of what’s under the hood. In retrospect, I should’ve donated to a charity."
That's a pretty callous way to end a post, Alex. It's not either-or. If you really feel that way, ask for a refund. Donate the money to charity whether you get the refund or not.
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#6What an echo chamber.
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#7I completely agree with Alex. I read the "App.net is not vaporware" post by Dalton, but still when watching the video and reading about it all I see is a vague promise and nothing special. He talks a lot about being "aligned with MY interests", but how does he know what those are? Its intentionally vague to avoid discussing hard decisions big companies like Facebook or Twitter need to make every day, regardless of where their funding comes from.
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#8[deleted]
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#9If "reserve your username" wasn't a benefit of pledging, the project wouldn't even have come close to reaching the funding target.
Re: The money part of App.net is a red herring
#10I don't know if red herring would be the way to call it, but the general summation that the "success" of App.net is due to marketing (particularly the out-pouring of Dalton Caldwell to the internet masse) is spot on.
Most people, especially on HN, pointed to the way "Dalton handled things" as the reason for wanting App.net to succeed. What drives the majority of the activity on App.net are these continuing discussions of what App.net could be, how fantastic it could be and what are the various kinds of pains it would solve. In fact, these very same conversations are as generic and ambiguous as the way that I describe them. Very few specific points are brought up, but rather, there are these sweeping discussions taking place on the platform.
I'm kind of curious whether what Dalton is trying to do with app.net is only capable of being accomplished with Twitter and with Twitter only. This is considering Twitter's userbase, Twitter's 3rd party app ecosystem, Twitter's traction and Twitter's history.
My point in saying this is that, it's impossible to recreate all this with another service (app.net). They are starting from scratch not only in function, but in context. I'd argue this is what's leading to the ambiguous dynamic and cloudy future for the service.