121–130 of 130 posts
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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).
The Armenti is a bit of a joke, I think.
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The thing with projects/apps/sites is that there's a threshold of time before it's considered passe. It's not logical and we in turn waste a lot of time and resources reinventing the wheel but that's the truth of the matter. I can't shake the feeling that this initiative suffers from the worst of both worlds. It's not entirely open AND it's a paid service.
Maybe you're right, but you could just as easily frame it as the best of both worlds: It's driven by the user's interests and it has the polish of a commercial product.
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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?
Another model that might be worth trying is pay to send, free to receive. So if people just want to follow Scoble, let Scoble pay for 'em.
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What's the product then?
Have you taken a moment to read anything about it? It is abundantly clear. join.app.net, in case you really haven't, which I'm hoping is the case.
If that's your idea of a product... good luck.
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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…
I do understand this, and would like it to be true. But until at least one application actually exists that twitter won't or can't do, this is all promises, and those apps (which I hope aren't limited to user clients) are, in fact, vaporware. To a user, this $50 isn't today buying them anything they can't get from twitter, which is why app.net might not get funded.
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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.
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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.
Is it such a bad example? I'm not sure what app.net is. A "real-time social feed" that I pay for? As a developer (his primary audience), what does this do for me over Twitter or Facebook?
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I do understand this, and would like it to be true. But until at least one application actually exists that twitter won't or can't do, this is all promises, and those apps (which I hope aren't limited to user clients) are, in fact, vaporware. To a user, this $50 isn't today buying them anything they can't get from twitter, which is why app.net might not get funded.
Well this has only been promoted for like 3 weeks, so give it a minute. There's a chicken or egg problem, if no one buys into the dream before it's reality then it will fail.
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…
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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…
No, I disagree on this. This is not true. Remember, the developers wouldn't even care about developing for this platform if it wasn't big in the first place. Developers didn't make it big. Twitter became big, and developers came flocking in.