Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

I'm not sure what bothers me so much about crowdfunding this. It just doesn't seem quite right, and the use of GitHub as an example stood out as flawed. I would definitely be more convinced by a great-but-buggy prototype than a video of someone looking off in to the distance. I don't mean that as a jab: it's symbolically kind of unsettling. You're talking about how much the community matters, but you're talking to someone else.

To me, the proposed project touches on a much bigger issue of how Twitter is a part of the internet infrastructure. Real time messaging has become really important, and there's some anxiety around how that infrastructure can be a part of the web in some trusted way.

Simply making Twitter community supported doesn't appear to me to be the best decision. We've learned about some great potential from Twitter, and I'm much more excited about something fully decentralized than I am interested in a community supported Twitter clone.

Precisely why I like pinboard.in so much, and why I love the idea of app.net.

I, as a consumer, don't want a service that I rely on to be heavily VC-funded in this day and age, because it means they will have unrealistic expectations to grow revenue phenomenally, which means they might screw the service with ads, or choke the data that the service collects; which means it is likely that the starting point of any new Web 2.0 product is awesome but it only gets worse after that, with ad and feature-creep.

We keep hearing that the cost of computing is coming down and yet the cost of a service (in terms of privacy lost, irritating ads shown, or restrictive API terms) seems to be going up and up.

[Edit: grammar]

> we have been spending the majority of our engineering resources the past 8 months building a “secret project”.... Additionally, we already have much of this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes, and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system. This isn’t vaporware.

So basically... it's already built.

> To manifest this grand vision, we are officially launching a Kickstarter-esque campaign. We will only accept money for this financially sustainable, ad-free service if we hit what I believe is critical mass. I am defining minimum critical mass as $500,000, which is roughly equivalent to ~10,000 backers.

Oh that's interesting. The grand vision will not manifest until $500k is raised. But isn't the product already basically finished?

So what happens if they don't raise $500k? Do they kill the product and flush 8 months of hard work (and presumably a bunch of money) down the drain? Doubt it. That doesn't make any sense.

Something is fishy here.

As a hacker who just terminated his FB account, it sounds like I'm the target audience. But I have to confess that after reading the blog post and clicking through to the faux Kickstarter page, my response went from "That could be interesting" to "That's disappointing."

If they are going to leverage the Kickstarter model, then they should at least learn from other KS projects: show me the problem, build a prototype, show the prototype solving the problem, play cool music, and for crying out loud look at me (the camera) when talking.

There's probably a good reason that Kickstarter doesn't accept nebulous web businesses - scaling manufacturing costs real money, but building a software prototype is cheap. If someone had made a video dryly explaining GitHub or DuckDuckGo as a concept prior to developing them, I wouldn't have signed up. But I find them invaluable today.

I agree. While the article got me interested, the video was disappointing. I expected Dalton to show me something, not just talk for three minutes. In the article, he writes "This isn’t vaporware." So where's the screencast?

Worse, he's not a very convincing speaker. The impatient demeanor, the failure to look directly at the camera, and the multiple stitched-together takes all suggest a lack of confidence. If you're not good at public speaking, fine, but admit that and pick a better way to present your pitch.

Ultimately, I'm left feeling like the idea is a good one, but doubting whether he is the right person to build it.