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Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

daltoncaldwell.com

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Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#21

Post by Samuel_Michon »

cheald wrote: post #19
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why would people pay to tell other people what they ate for lunch?" Twitter and Facebook were fun when not everyone and their parents were on there. I'm hoping that the price tag keeps a lot of the people out who don't have anything of value to share. So far, from what I've seen on the alpha site, the conversations are way more interesting to me than most banter on Twitter. The higher limit of 256 characters helps t…

The quality of content in a community is always higher when the community is smaller. Twitter conversations in the early days were all high-quality, too. Social networks live and die by whether your friends are on them, though, and while I get the appeal of "keeping out the riff-raff", I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that you can reach critical mass (without which your product will fail) by charging…

App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue, so I think we can say it already hit critical mass. For App.net to succeed, it didn't need millions of users, because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising.

I also don't see it as a typical social network, but more like a publishing platform for short posts — a mix of a micro blog, link log and photo album. I'd rather compare App.net to Tumblr and Posterous than to Twitter. Also, if readers want to respond to posts, they can do so on their own blog or on Facebook or Twitter. Charging subscribers an annual fee might become the service's biggest strength. I think it guarantees that App.net will attract very little passive users, the ones who sign up will actually use it.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#22

Post by ryanmerket »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #21
cheald wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of content in a community is always higher when the community is smaller. Twitter conversations in the early days were all high-quality, too. Social networks live and die by whether your friends are on them, though, and while I get the appeal of "keeping out the riff-raff", I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that you can reach critical mass (without which your product will fail) by charging…

App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue, so I think we can say it already hit critical mass. For App.net to succeed, it didn't need millions of users, because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising. I also don't see it as a typical social network, but more like a publishing platform for short posts — a mix of a micro blog, link log and photo album. I'd rather compare…

"..because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising." -- Uh, yeah it is. They took millions from VCs.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#24

Post by sp332 »

dwynings wrote: post #5
dangrossman wrote: post #2

Did Svbtle change its font recently? The text looks terrible. It's blurry, poorly aliased and some of the letters have full-out gaps in the strokes. When viewed in Windows, of course.

Yes, it used to be Proxima Nova served with Typekit.

My browser (FF on Win7) still renders as Proxima Nova.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#25

Post by jschlesser »

citricsquid wrote: post #11
rorrr wrote: post #9

I watched the video, and I still don't know what app.net is. "Social platform" is all I got, that's extremely vague.

Twitter, that you pay for, that has no adverts and that is developer friendly with the API. I think that's a good summary: https://alpha.app.net/

I think thats a narrow short term view of it but easy to assume given the surface information. Messages need to be succinct and understandable in familiar contexts and i think Ost of the opinions are based on 'ad free twitter' which isnt the big excitement in the app.net community. Im cross posting. Im a supporter but not an employee. I have read a lot more in depth and here is my take. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373394

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#26

Post by Samuel_Michon »

ryanmerket wrote: post #22
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue, so I think we can say it already hit critical mass. For App.net to succeed, it didn't need millions of users, because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising. I also don't see it as a typical social network, but more like a publishing platform for short posts — a mix of a micro blog, link log and photo album. I'd rather compare…

"..because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising." -- Uh, yeah it is. They took millions from VCs.

I stand corrected. According to Crunchbase, they took $5 million from Andreessen Horowitz.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mixed-media-labs

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#28

Post by briandear »

citricsquid wrote: post #11
rorrr wrote: post #9

I watched the video, and I still don't know what app.net is. "Social platform" is all I got, that's extremely vague.

Twitter, that you pay for, that has no adverts and that is developer friendly with the API. I think that's a good summary: https://alpha.app.net/

But are developers going to have to pay for use of the API? And users will have to pay to use apps that use the API right?

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#29

Post by jmonegro »

briandear wrote: post #27

>>There has been zero manipulation of numbers, or “stuffing of the ballot box” by App.net. Why would he even suggest that? I wouldn't have expected such behavior.

Some people suggested this would happen, see: https://twitter.com/aaronsw/status/234628499690885120

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#30

Post by julian37 »

Congratulations from me, too! A very impressive result in such a short timeframe.

In danger of asking a silly question, I do wonder about this bit though:

In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner.

I might not be seeing the forest for the trees here, but how would anybody actually go about doing that? If you don't release identifying information (which I assume would include names, credit card numbers, and so on) how would anybody be able to verify?

I'm not, in the slightest, implying there was any wrongdoing, I have no reason to believe that App.net is inflating any numbers or isn't "operated in an honest manner". I'm just genuinely curious to know how it would be possible to independently vet that all transactions were legit (or whatever it is you're trying to prove).

Am I correct to assume that the best anybody could do would be to say that "the numbers looks right"? Or maybe something like "the amount of money transferred via Stripe to App.net is in the right ballpark"? If people can do better, how so? Again, genuine question.

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