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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

Your page copy and the first few minutes of your video that I could sit through just tell me you are nerd raging over advertising on the internet. I get that you want to do something differently, but WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU BUILDING?

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?

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There is a FAQ entry that attempts to address the question "OK, great, but what exactly is this product you will be delivering?" Are you unsatisfied with our answer in the FAQ?

UPDATE I appreciate and agree with the feedback that we could explained things earlier and more clearly. Updates to our page coming soon.

dalton, I think that's a good answer but it needs to be way above the fold. I had to watch the video before I knew exactly what was up.

Hey Dalton & crew – congrats on this launch. I think that technologically, it's mostly clear what you want to build, but the thing that might be confusing is just that it is only described as "a real-time feed and API." Although you mention it's "Twitter-like," there still feels like there's some ambiguity in what type of content this feed is used for, especially since it's a paid service with the name App.net. For example, I don't know if I'm signing up to have a new social service, or a service that I'll mostly utilize in conjunction with app development, etc.

I appreciate the need for vagueness in your answer to the question of "What exactly are you building?" I'm sure in many ways you and your team don't know exactly how it's going to grow and change, and I for one would rather have the team making this thing be flexible and reactive as opposed to building to a spec that was promised to customers.

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.

Pro tip: nobody should have to find the FAQ. Esp. if you're crowdfunding.

It took me 15 minutes to understand what "feed" means, which then lead me to understand what "social service" means. I think you intro paragraph could be clarified by replacing the word "service" with "platform". I know this isn't strictly true, but it's clearer to distinguish between platforms, which are for developers and services, which are for users. Try this:

"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."

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