App.net project update #1 | Hacker News Reader

App.net project update #1

daltoncaldwell.com

46 pointsdalton24 comments

Hi Dalton,

Honestly, I am conflicted about this endeavor. As a current App.net customer/user, I was very confused about the original announcement because the idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the current App.net product. So now I am worried that App.net as I understand it today might go away if you head in this new direction (I see in the FAQ you will support the current product for a year).

On the one hand, I am over Twitter. Done. It is way too noisy now, and I have been severely burned by their dev ecosystem. I put in so much time and effort (naively, I admit), and the aftertaste is super bitter. You and I have talked about this before at length, so I won't go into detail. That level of ecosystem-scorching has made me hesitant to put a lot of time and effort into something new and similar. This may be unfounded since I know you are wanting to do the right thing by your developers, but still the soreness remains and affects my judgement.

There are other non-ad-supported systems for this type of communication out there. Some are federated (status.net), some are not (heello.com). You and I both watched the immediate demise and shaming of heello. How will this be different? Perhaps it is the pay-to-play nature that will keep the trolls out at the start.

On the other hand, I can see where this would be very useful if it was in fact implemented correctly as an actual real-time feed platform. Using a combination of webhooks (pubsubhubbub) and data-streams (e.g. twitter streaming API), this could be a really powerful platform for developers, builders, and makers to finally bring about The Internet of Things that many have been dreaming about. I am worried that this is such a niche desire of a few inventive hackers that there won't be enough support behind it to sustain it as a centralized company (however, I don't see how an open, federated system is sustainable in this fashion either, so).

I know you are very passionate about this problem. We've discussed it before. I know this is something that you want to see exist, and so as a fellow builder and maker you are insanely driven to see it become a reality. I understand this drive. I just don't want it to derail your company :)

I don't know. I'm excited but hesitant. I have not backed the project yet because I'm still not sure... I have a lot of thoughts in this space as well, so maybe we should talk in person. I will be watching the progress intently!

My core belief is that companies/people behave the way they do, in both good in bad ways, because of financial incentives.

If this is a real market for this kind of paid service, I believe that sets up the correct financial incentives. It also solves for scaling issues, troll issues, and financial sustainability of the company.

If I can't validate the market via the join.app.net campaign, then we can still say that we tried, and won't take anyone's money/let anyone down.

Happy to meet in person

If you really want to validate your market, you should remove the Developer and Pro Tier commitments. Stick to your original blog post of securing 10,000 backers like you noted in your original proposal. Right now, your Kickstarter campaign is designed in a way that may lead to false positives.

The barriers to entry as a messaging infrastructure service play are low. Even if your platform is reliable and stable, you will be quickly commoditized to competing on price which is not a sustainable business model.

The financial incentives seem to be working entirely against you...

From a user standpoint: One has no reason to join. Adoption occurs when the benefits of joining are greater than cost of joining. You inflated the cost of signups from 30 seconds to $50. For people considered wealthy, that's still over 100x the cost. Having no ads is hardly 100x the return, especially when you still have a massive chicken/egg problem to solve. It's like trying to make Google+ overtake Facebook. It's hard to begin with - it's impossible if it didn't have the resources of Google and wasn't free.

From a developer standpoint: The service is useless without far more users than your asking for. The data won't be compelling with 10k, especially considering the personality that App.net currently appeals to is so monotonous. As much as I like to hear NoSQL vs SQL arguments, it's pretty fucking banal when you compare that to someone on the other side of the world tweeting about war or a natural disaster. Twitter is as much an outlet for media as it is an inlet and the friction of your monetization strategy greatly hinders who can tell their stories.

Sustainability doesn't mean viability. You'll make money no doubt but that has really no correlation to the quality of the service, which, unless it's free, pretty much fucks everyone but you.

Twitter will be real time in due time. In the meantime, I urge you to stop striving to be Twitter and instead more like maybe Meteor. Making a good real-time framework seems to stick to the idea's roots while filling a need that is actually needed. However the project develops, I truly wish you the best :)

Using history as a guide, SMTP was open. But number of people using gmail+yahoo+hotmail+aol etc (a handful of implementations) account for more than 99% (just a guess) in consumer market? Telephony started off with open standards, but in any country, it still came down to a handful of companies.I would guess that if the telephone market was not geography and government constrained, it would have ended up with a handful of companies for the whole world. These days, I don't even see the trend of something starting open and eventually becoming closed. It starts off closed from the start. facebook, twitter etc. The takeaway, is that, anything that presents users with dead simple thing wins. Anything that makes users do the work loses. People don't care about open or closed. It is always what is easiest. nothing else matters.

The general premise for the goal of having a paid product rather than having an ad-supported product is definitely noble. And it will work for many people and many products. However, I heard more about the idea of not selling your soul to advertisers than hearing about the actual product itself.

Right now there's nothing tangible for me to get excited about. I consider myself a tech-minded person, despite not being a hacker, but this project still seems vague to me.

Often projects that get press make most of their funding right off the top with the rest trickling in without a huge boost. Pending some big press for the project, I'm not sure yet if it can make it. But I've enjoyed Dalton's interviews and blogs over time and he has some great insights, so I'm still rooting for it.

As I stated in the announcement I'm not sure if this project will make it either.

I like to think it will, but only because we earn sufficient trust from a sufficient number of people over this 30 day process.

I want this to be awesome. I feel the void of great apps while trawling through my flat feed, searching and scanning for info that should flow to me through a thousand different apps, just as I need it. BUT, I won't spend $50 on a dream, without seeing some kind of real demo. Prove that you can do this right by showing off something awesome twitter can't or won't.

I propose this front end for the ecosystem:

http://my-stuff-online.appspot.com/

* warning: safari and chrome in OSX only.

Not to be over simplistic, but how is this different from RSS?

It is push vs. pull.

Given that they probably got the biggest rust of donations at the beginning, it seems like they aren't doing particularly well on their fundraising goal. Looks like they might come up short?

Why would people use this instead of Twitter?

I think there a number of interesting use-cases that were underserved by Twitter's decision to become a widescale media company.

I described my vision of what opportunity I think was lost here: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

I am running this experiment to establish, to the best of my abilities, whether or not there is a market for the sort of service I described and want to exist. The practical applications would be fairly different than a celebrity-focused gossip site.

I cannot imagine anyone having any emotional buy in for your proposal until you've came up with explicit use cases that are today not possible with Twitter.

I think Twitter as a product sucks, this is why I use TweetBot. I agree it is tedious having to do two step authentication for 3rd party clients, but i do that once.

Most consumers are driven by those celebrity-gossip services that silicon valley entrepreneurs roll their eyes at. Twitter simply peeled back the mystery (reason #34324 why Twitter is amazing) about what people talk and think about most of the time.

What are you going to do when TweetBot is shutdown?

if that were to happen, I'd use a different client: because the content trumps the user experience.

Out of curiosity, why don't you currently use the official Twitter app for iOS?

the level of craftsmanship on Tweetbot delights me to no end. Also being able to see which of my tweets have been retweeted. But mainly it just feels like the most beautiful and polished piece of software ever.

One theory:

As Twitter continues to disfavor outside clients, there might be innovation (especially around mixing info from many sources) that's only possible in an alternate system... a system that doesn't require end-user/endpoint interface control in order to collect its sustaining revenues.

the problem i see with this whole thing is that twitter (which is the company you are disappointed of) is a pain only to developers because they want to use their (more and more restrictive) api but not to the users. obviously they suffer too in the long run by not getting any innovative third party twitter clients or other useful stuff that's based on the twitter api. but this is (a) too far away in the future and (b) most of them won't know why that is or worse not even care.

the thing is: the reason why developers want access to the twitter api in the first place is because the users are there. you cannot just make a paradise for developers when there are no actual users feeding data into the system. one of the main reasons twitter got to where it is today is because celebrities started using it and their fans followed... you cannot reconstruct this phenomenon in the way you're trying to pull it off.

maybe, what you're trying to do is something completey else. maybe you want a service rather for machines to talk to, as a service purely for developers. than that's something completely else.

Your final conclusion is about right.

Also, keep in mind, a large portion of the growth of Twitter was driven by the technical innovation of 3rd-party developers (ie the first iOS app)

They built their service on the back of cool things developers built, and now seem intent on destroying the very same ecosystem which ensured their popularity now that they are succesful -> http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

I think this sucks, and I am trying to do something about it, rather than just complain on the Internet.

if it is my final paragraph that is correct, then i don't understand why you are referring to twitter et al when announcing your service. you are obviously not in competition with them at all (with the exception of bot nets as a customer base maybe).

This is a catch-22. I have to refer to the comparable service and API to give some idea of what we are talking about, and where the inspiration came from.

Whether any startup founder likes it or not, their startups and projects will get put into buckets and will get called things like "the X of Y" or "like X a Y put together" or "X for dogs".

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