Why startups should care about App.net
medium.com
Why startups should care about App.net
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#2I think it would be great if app.net succeeds, but personally I had to stop using it. Just too many of "Nick Burns, your company's computer guy" for me.
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#3so it's like Facebook but with less users and a less developed API?
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#4I think the key thing at the moment is why their customers should care about App.net
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#5I'm really trying to understand app.net, I used it for a little while and browsed the apps people had made for it but they all just seemed like mobile and desktop clients to send status updates to alpha. It also seems as though you need an app.net account to use an app built with their API which seems very limiting to me in terms of the type of markets you can reach. What's the incentive for someone to use app.net's API over something such as hull.io?
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#6I sort of understand the reasoning behind App.net, but I'm worried that its developer focus will prevent many average users from joining the service and prevent it from really providing the social layer that's necessary to actually build something network-driven out of it.
The reason Facebook and Twitter are popular platforms are not necessarily because of their particular features or user data but because of the massive networks they represent. By tying our products to their ecosystem, you're able to leverage their technologies and data while still having a large enough addressable market. This is definitely not the case with App.net (at least so far).
I think what App.net might have that's unique is an active developer community (as opposed to a mass of average users), so perhaps it can standalone as a developer-friendly social platform, but I'm questionable as to whether anything of mass market value can come out of it, especially on the B2C side.
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#7I find people's attitudes on HN difficult to decipher on this issue. Run this search on Google:
posthaven site:news.ycombinator.com
the full URL:
https://www.google.com/search?q=posthaven+site%3Anews.ycombi...
and for App.net:
https://www.google.com/search?q=posthaven+site%3Anews.ycombi...
On HN, those 2 sites are roughly equal, or possibly PostHaven gets a little bit more attention. Why is that?
Both sites offer micro-blogging. App.net has been around longer and has devoted more resources to building an API that will allow 3rd party developers to do interesting things with its micro-blogging service.
You can post images to App.net.
You can post long-form essays to App.net.
You can post short tweets to App.net.
App.net has over 20 3rd party apps already, which offers a kind of social proof from 3rd party developers that PostHaven does not yet have.
So why is it that people are willing to talk about PostHaven, and give its model some serious consideration, while dismissing App.net?
App.net offers everything that PostHaven offers, but App.net is much further developed.
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#8so it's like Facebook but with less users and a less developed API?
I think the point is that it's not like Facebook; with facebook, you, the user, are the product. With app.net, the platform is the product, and you pay for it.
Facebook makes decisions about its system based on maximizing its ad revenue, not maximizing your ability to do the things you want with it. A product not relying on advertising can focus entirely on the users, ideally.
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#9It seems that he is suggesting app.net to build two-sided market for social apps: users on one side and developers on the other side.
Sounds great - once they build a successful marketplace. But until then, the value proposition is not currently compelling. As a user - ad-free is not in itself compelling enough (yes, ad-free with a user base similar to twitter or facebooks is compelling), and as a developer their user base is again too small to matter.
They likely need to figure out which group is more important. If it is users, they likely need to focus on a killer app, or a killer community (perhaps by focusing the group they are targeting). If developers are more important, and they don't have a user base that is large enough to be compelling, perhaps they need to pith a different pricing model to developers (something to the effect of free to build apps and $1/user with these 100 social features).
Re: Why startups should care about App.net
#10so it's like Facebook but with less users and a less developed API?
I think the point is that it's not like Facebook; with facebook, you, the user, are the product. With app.net, the platform is the product, and you pay for it. Facebook makes decisions about its system based on maximizing its ad revenue, not maximizing your ability to do the things you want with it. A product not relying on advertising can focus entirely on the users, ideally.
People scream about paying 0.99 for an app on the App Store yet App.net thinks all of the free-chasers are going to want to pay for yet another social network and one that has no ubiquity? Good luck to them.