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Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

daltoncaldwell.com

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Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#41

Post by nikcub »

danso wrote: post #10

I hate to be old school media here...but I wish this was announced on Monday or any other time besides Friday afternoon, when it will get less notice. Because it's a great announcement.

Funny because that is exactly the time that I advise most people to make their announcements. When there are just as many people surfing the web looking for news (our numbers at Techcrunch were higher pageviews per post on weekends) but all the mainstream journalists and the PR people you are competing with for attention are at home asleep.

The tech blogs that run 24/7 are dying for stories at this time of the week since the PR production line comes to a halt on Friday. This announcement is the second biggest tech story today[1] and has attracted comment from a bunch of blogs. I think it barely would have registered on a Monday or Tuesday.

[1] http://www.techmeme.com/120713/p37#a120713p37

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dalton wrote: post #30
drhayes9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the FAQ: Why aren't you using Kickstarter? We wish we could, we

from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines "projects, projects, projects. As in all categories, Kickstarter is for projects that can be completed, not things that require maintenance to exist. This means no e-commerce sites, web businesses, or social networking sites. (Yes, this means Kickstarter wouldn’t be allowed on Kickstarter. Funny, but true.)"

[deleted]

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#43

Post by comex »

So, this is a service where I'll pay $5 a month -ish to use a network that's basically the same as Twitter (in particular, not decentralized), except with no users and, considering the amount of effort being put into Twitter clients, probably inferior clients? It'll have no ads, but the ads on Twitter are pretty minimal from what I've seen, and presently as a third party client user I don't get any. It'll be open to "apps" which can extend the experience (and have a longer character limit), but to me Twitter's simplicity is its core selling point. It'll supposedly be used by the top 10,000 hackers, but identi.ca already tried that and it didn't work - network effect is important.

I love the spirit of this, but as described, I wouldn't use the service if it were free. Twitter isn't even in the same ballpark as SourceForge. shrug

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#44

Post by dalton »

guynamedloren wrote: post #35

> 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…

The product we have built is very similar, but not as ambitious as this proposal. That is the fork in the road.

I am going to a followup post explaining this more. This first post was probably too long as it is.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#45

Post by zmitri »

jon_dahl wrote: post #40
graue wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a tangent, but Dalton is actually a really charismatic speaker. He was probably the favorite speaker of my YC class, and was reportedly great at Startup School a few years ago (though I wasn't there). Must come off better in person.

I think this is the talk you are referencing?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/imeem-founder-dalton-caldwe...

I very much enjoyed it.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#46

Post by dalton »

comex wrote: post #43

So, this is a service where I'll pay $5 a month -ish to use a network that's basically the same as Twitter (in particular, not decentralized), except with no users and, considering the amount of effort being put into Twitter clients, probably inferior clients? It'll have no ads, but the ads on Twitter are pretty minimal from what I've seen, and presently as a third party client user I don't get any. It'll be open to…

My belief is that it won't just be "Twitter with less users", but something entirely different: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

For example, I remember hearing that Yammer and StockTwits toyed with building on top of Twitter at one point, and decided that they were best off building separate networks.

I am doing this project because rather than just complaining about how I think things should go, I am going to personally do something about it. It will work or it won't work, but at least I will know that I gave it a shot.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#47

Post by comex »

dalton wrote: post #46
comex wrote: post #43

So, this is a service where I'll pay $5 a month -ish to use a network that's basically the same as Twitter (in particular, not decentralized), except with no users and, considering the amount of effort being put into Twitter clients, probably inferior clients? It'll have no ads, but the ads on Twitter are pretty minimal from what I've seen, and presently as a third party client user I don't get any. It'll be open to…

My belief is that it won't just be "Twitter with less users", but something entirely different: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been For example, I remember hearing that Yammer and StockTwits toyed with building on top of Twitter at one point, and decided that they were best off building separate networks. I am doing this project because rather than just complaining about how I think things should g…

Of course, I wish you the very best of luck. :)

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#48

Post by benatkin »

drhayes9 wrote: post #17
benatkin wrote: post #16

Seems odd to not actually use KickStarter. Won't running a homegrown fundraising platform distract from solving the messaging problem? And don't you have to make a case for something that KickStarter already spent a lot of time making a case for? (I was turned off when I first heard about KickStarter, and I still am, to a lesser extent, but I finally pitched in for two projects.)

From the FAQ: Why aren't you using Kickstarter? We wish we could, we

Thanks for pointing that out. I still find a self-hosted Kickstarter-style campaign unpalatable.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#49

Post by aneth4 »

guynamedloren wrote: post #35

> 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…

The purpose is not to raise $500k, but to have around 10k committed users - committed enough that they paid and will likely contribute content. This is what they feel they need to get off the ground.

So nothing is fishy. It's quite clever actually. They can almost guarantee that they will have a nice launch if the strategy works.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

#50

Post by fauigerzigerk »

I'm probably not the target audience for this because I don't understand what the proposal is. Or maybe I'd have to read some of his earlier posts to understand what this is about.

What is a real time feed and service or a social platform in general? Is this basically Facebook sans the UI for a monthly fee?

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