App.net is crowdfunding their realtime feed platform
join.app.net
join.app.net
In a network-effect dominated business, this doesn't seem like a recipe for success.
I'm not predicting success here, I'm not even sure what the exact product is beyond a general idea of a twitter-gone-the-API route.
I'm in favor of the project. We'll all learn from it and I admire his moxie in trying it. I'm getting out my credit now to give it a $ upvote.
Ad-supported mass-market audiovisual entertainment dominated for decades... but there's still a growing niche for audience-paid ad-unencumbered alternatives: Pandora, satellite radio, ITunes, NetFlix.
If a user makes you $1/mo in ads then you could charge that user a multiple based on the growth rate of that income.
So if they are pretty steadily using your app and clicking on ads just use a 1.5x multiplier which would be $18/yr.
If their usage is growing and they are clicking on more ads then use a larger multiple, like 10x and charge them $10/mo.
Once you consider these users who "buy their own ad space" as advertisers, in a way you'll start converging on making a better product for people that pay.
Of course, the issues with this system is that it doesn't scale. The more users that become paying users the less data you have to predict how much you would be making on ads per user. Eventually, you would have to start guessing at that price.
This downside could be averted if someone created an API that allowed companies like twitter or facebook to POST information about a user and the API would broker how much that user is worth either by algorithm or auction and the user would be given a chance to beat the top price.
Just a thought.
(a) [Free] makes it easy for people to join initially. More people makes it more attractive to other people (via network effects).
Getting around that is going to be a problem.
As far as I can tell from the video and FAQ, that's what it is. A twitter clone that costs $50 a year. If this is NOT what it is, you simply have to do a better job illustrating what this platform is supposed to deliver.
I wrote a blogpost about my thinking behind this here: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal
What am I becoming a "member" of? What am I funding? App.net appears to be a way to get more installs of mobile apps. What the hell?
UPDATE I appreciate and agree with the feedback that we could explained things earlier and more clearly. Updates to our page coming soon.
I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.
Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.
You've got my money.
"We're building a real-time platform that allows developers to create social services where users come first, not advertisers.
Our team has spent the last 9 years building social services, developer platforms, mobile applications and more.
We believe that advertising-supported platforms are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done.
Help us create the platform we all wish existed."
Edit: I hadn't read your original post at http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been. I just read it and now it makes sense. I have a feeling your video will reach a much wider audience, so others might feel lost as well.
For instance, the vast majority of GitHub users don't pay a dime, since they only use open source projects (which are free to host). There are many people/companies that use the paid service (mine included), but we pay for the "added feature" of being able to keep the repo private.
Good luck with the cause! There's potential here.
"I've been inspired to build exactly the service that I want manifested. And that service is called App.net and this video is announcing this project... what is actually is is a real time feed and API, and rather than being a free and add supported service with no clear business model, we are actually going to be paid, and the reason I am so optimistic with a paid opportunity is that it aligns the incentives... etc. etc"
https://twitter.com/fascinated/status/223906673457238016
edit: I see i am not the only one. Sorry for the noise, but maybe take it as another vote for more clarity.
thank you for communicating in a constructive way :)
What other incentives would you suggest? Happy to take suggestions. Today is the "announcement" phase, we are going to be collaborating w/interested folks and fleshing things out considerably more over the next month.
(p.s. I have been awake for far too many hours, so I am not sure I can effectively keep replying to everyone at the moment)
Good luck, and get some sleep!
While it might seem 'right' to us, who understand the effort this requires and appreciate the value it provides, especially over an ad funded service, $50/year just doesn't seem like it would appeal to the general public.
I suspect that even many of the savvy folks here would not lay out $50/yr for Twitter or Facebook if either were to switch to a directly funded model, and they have the advantage that they already have big networks.
I have no scientific basis to this, but I feel like for this to be a success, 99 cents a month, or $10/year, would be a price point to shoot for. I have no idea if it's plausible to run something like this at that price.
[I know, I sell a $10 iPhone app, so I perhaps am not the best person to make this comment...]
Either build it and I'll pay to use it or I pay you to build it and I use it for free. Can't have it both ways.
So entirely separate from any quibbling about the likelihood of success, I'm backing this project at the developer level ($100).
This post strikes me as a "gee whiz" rediscovery of that fact through the conflation of:
1. Web 2.0 companies that "won" were really media companies. To win you need lots of eye balls.
2. A person can charge more for a product than it costs and get profit, which can be reinvested back into the product.
3. Instead of waiting for "profit" in said point above (which is risk to you and your company), you can instead reallocate that risk on future customers (and gauge interest at the same time).
That said, I do admire Dalton's efforts.
Costolo: We’re not a media company. We’re in the media business. We distribute traffic. We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media property.
Dick Costolo seems to understand that driving traffic - perhaps from ads - is where Twitter makes money
It feels unfair to pull that quote out of context. The point you are making is very different than the point that Costolo was making when he said it.
Do you say you are a media company? Because - by your definition - you are! There are plenty of media companies that don't sell advertising (eg, book publishers).
Twitter isn't a media company because they say they aren't! They see their goal as microblogging/self expression/communication (or whatever it is), and selling ads is just a means to that end. Google is that same - they see themselves as a engineering company organizing all the worlds information, and selling ads is just how they pay for it.
Compare that to something like News Ltd or NYT. They seem themselves as a media companies, and so when they run into technology problems they don't adapt well.
That said, I hope it succeeds and I'll be contributing some of my hard-earned cash.
As it is, I watched the first minute, and I still had no idea what benefit this would provide me as a developer or a user (only that Dalton clearly doesn't like Facebook), so I went back to my own coding.
The reason I am happy to pay Github $25/month is because I want access to all my old projects. What is your thesis around whether people really want access to their old "feed" data (is that a proper way to describe it)?
"Why aren't you using Kickstarter?
We wish we could, we <3 Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter Terms Of Service explicitly prohibits raising money for this kind of service. "
>> A project is not open-ended. Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project.
He's starting a business.
It's likely all in how it's framed. There's probably a way to get this on KS if that's what is truly desired.
If he could reproduce the twitter API so it would be easy to switch any current twitter client, I say go for it.