App.net 3rd-party revshare proposal
daltoncaldwell.com
daltoncaldwell.com
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'Hey, you should try app.net'
'Oh yeah? What is it?'
'It's the same thing as twitter, except you have to pay $50 to get on it, and it's nowhere near as popular as twitter, yet. But it has no ads, and they don't screw over third party devs.'
'Sounds questionable to me. I don't care about 3rd party developers, and not having an occasional ad pop up in my stream is not worth $50 to me. Especially if twitter is way more popular and useful anyway.'
'Well, shit.'
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This is not going to take off with the support of the dev community alone - it needs to appeal to normal people. And right now, everything about it does not. The name, the website, the pitch, the fees - none of it makes any sense to anyone but a dev.
I am getting tired of arguing with people about this. We will just have to agree to disagree. I am willing to take the risk of failure because I saw this exact developer-centric approach work before.
UPDATE: Regarding the comments below, if you read my original announcement post, I made the point that this is architected by be financially sustainable on a critical mass, small user-base: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal
I cited this Paul Graham post discussing the strength of a core geeky userbase: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
Let's say that someone followed PGs advice on that proposal. Wouldn't the same criticisms about not appealing to normies also apply?
Twitter in the beginning: "Post what you are doing & see what people you like are doing in 140 characters or less." This is very tangible and makes plenty of sense to normal people, immediately.
This is just something to think about, hope you don't take it as an attack or an argument. I'm clearly not the only one who has this opinion - it might be worth mulling over humanizing the project even if just a little bit.
Sorry if you've explained it elsewhere (I've not been paying much attention) but can you cite/explain that claim? My experience might be different, but most of the "normal people" I know of that use Twitter use it through the apps for their mobile (eg: iPhone, Blackberry) and they use it because that's the device they use, not because the apps are incredible and make Twitter appealing, the Twitter network is appealing. Based on this wouldn't the correct argument be that making Twitter available to everyone easily is what caused Twitter's mainstream success?
I think you explained the problem yourself: At day 0 Twitter made no sense to users and Twitter had 0 barriers to entry, all you had to do was sign up! How can app.net get over that problem while charging $50? If I'm correct that ease of access/use is what made Twitter mainstream wouldn't that mean you're doing the exact opposite of what made Twitter successful?
I really love the idea and hope it succeeds, but I don't see how you can appeal to anyone outside of the tech circle when charging for access.
PG also advices is that you should make things people want, people as users who use the app. People don't care about the tech or how nice it's for developers. If you build something that people like to use, and have nice API terms, people will use it and developers will develop on top of it.
Probably the only reason why people would care is that the apps and the whole network would be better, but that's huge chicken&egg problem.
If you look at the state on Windows Phone platform, Microsoft is even paying to people to develop on it, but no-one still care's because there are no users.
It sucks for third-party devs, and it sucks for us power Twitter users who like our third-party clients, but look at every time Facebook introduces major changes: people huff and puff about switching to something else (Google+, etc), but the status quo doesn't actually change because the value is in the relationships they've formed on the service, not the way they interface with the service.
I hope you didn't mean this, and it was just a reaction to being irritated. Because if you consistently are this defensive, you'll have a hard time engaging the third-party developers.
Umm. I was an early Twitter user (April 07 - almost exactly a year before @daltonc), and I've never used any third party apps (except for Brizzly for a short period).
I think you are dramatically overestimating the impact 3rd part developers had. Twitter went mainstream when Ev went on Oprah. 3rd party devs worked on Twitter (initally) to scratch their own itches and because other people liked their work, not to make money.
It's true, as the argument says, that end-users won't care enough about Twitter's ads over the next year or two to abandon the service for a competitor. The ads themselves are just not that big of a deal.
But the need to draw revenue from ads is causing Twitter to make decisions that harm third-party developers. End-users don't care about third-party developers, but they very well might care about applications; if alterna-Twitter enables applications that users care about, the plight of developers or insidiousness of ads won't have to matter, because it'll be the apps themselves that sell the service.
You'd have to not charge users to get the network effects to kick in, but at that point, you're just a more open Twitter clone and you'll have to scramble to find a revenue source eventually.
For an email analogy, they are creating a POP protocol, when they should be creating SMTP.
That way you would have multiple clients vying for supremacy, but each able to communicate with each other. This would help drive users, since each service could have different features.
But unfortunately, it's a bit hard to build a company around a protocol.
For Twitter this would make a ton of sense because the rev-share would be based on impressions of ads, clicks, etc. The method to determine the dev's cut is straightforward and a known system (a la AdSense).
For App.net, as you correctly pointed out, the definition of "rev-share based on usage" is insanely complicated and the maximum value per user per month is capped at $2.08 (in the 50/50 scenario).
If I create a premium app.net client, would I still want to charge for it (e.g. iphone app)... would I even be allowed to charge for it in accordance w/ app.net TOS?
The idea of no first-party apps competing for user revenue is the ultimate dream of a platform that enables a 3rd party dev ecosystem. Sadly, many such platforms that began with that promise ultimately went back on it, much to devs' dismay. Much care would need to be taken to stick to this decision over the long term if this is decided up front.
Aside: I'm peeved that Svbtle doesn't allow comments. All the feedback you get must be out-of-band, and it creates extra steps for the people that read your posts.
Even if you get geeks on board as your early adopters, you're still going to miss out on the much larger non-geek demographic that make these social networks what they are, even to geeks. Remember, you're going for a social tool here, and so you'll need to make it easy for a person's entire social circle to join else it'll be rendered useless. If you're trying to position this as dev-centric alone and to foster a github-like community around dev topics, then I could see this working. But as a catch-all social network, I don't think this will take off.
I commend you for trying, of course. Definitely a lot gutsier than I am to take on such a bold endeavor.
But you know, it might be good to have an example of someone actually trying this and failing, so we don't have to just hypothesize that it will fail?
For instance if I run two apps that use their service - a game that I play every few days and a social aggregator that runs in the background all day long but that I generally I would like to define that the game is more "important" to me in terms of dollars than the app is. Perhaps the game is worth 90% of my payment and the app 5% and some random service that I tried and abandoned should get the other 5%
1) App.net's income per user is now 50% of the subscription price. You have to make that work financially for you.
2) The 3rd party's income per user is less than 50%. The most profitable 3rd party is going to be the client, so you've created a situation where interesting uses of the API that don't require user interaction are less profitable.
I want your platform to be successful, but I don't think this will contribute to it. You're going to spend a lot of time policing 3rd parties' attempt at gaming the system, which means time your not spending making the platform better. This is a rabbit hole you don't want to fall into.
@dalton: Maybe you should add the infamous "Kudos" button to the join.app.net site ;) !