Why isn't join.app.net catching on? | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't join.app.net catching on?

virtualpants.com

7 pointsjharrier17 comments

I don't think that the main problems are in name / marketing. While these, and price (which is a legit concern) definitely contribute, the whole idea doesn't sit that well with me.

First off, what exactly is it? JSON-based message bus PaaS? Paid social network? Appstore? A development platform? "mobile social entertainment provider"? Something else? I understand that they're working off a broad idea, but it would be reasonable IMO for someone to think that they're attempting each of these. The blog posts and join.app.net don't really clarify things too much. I think that a broad roadmap (or something accessible to users, and devs who don't want to read the whole backstory to try to figure it out) would really help here.

Next up, the project doesn't really sell me on its benefits. Developers/users can pay to be able to write to a feed that other developers/users pay to be able to access (or can access for free?)? There's some potential for turning it into an app-store type thing, making it free for developers and splitting user revenue (with the example given where app.net takes 50%)? What concrete benefits, as a developer, or user, will I be able to derive from this service, guaranteed, in the near future?

All of the questions here are part of the reason that I'm not particularly excited about it. IMO there are some great ideas in there, and it has a lot of potential, but at the moment it seems like it's not too much more than some hand-waving and assertions that Twitter's bad, and that you should pay for an (at current) nearly identical experience because it has a whole lot of potential at some undefined point in the future. When originally pitching the thing Caldwell made some comments about how it's not fair to assume that you can somehow improve your monetization later, but this seems to be almost the same thing in reverse - they've got their monetization down, but they're assuming that they can somehow add the value for users later. Of course, I could be completely misunderstanding what they're doing / trying to do or how they're going about doing it...

I think better marketing towards regular users instead of developers would help to explain many of these questions. They really need to explain to people what value app.net is going to add and why it is better than the free, ad-funded, alternatives. They have not done a very good job of that and marketing the correct message can help.

This post is obviously quite biased towards join.app.net, which I'm not entirely against but some of the arguments are very weak.

> The current price of $50/year for users and $100/year for developers is fair,

Not when you have no details over what the service is going to offer, what control you're going to have, and how the price may change in the future. Essentially, people have no idea what they're buying. You're asking for a $50 dollar a donation and offering WAY less information than any kickstarter campaign that I've seen.

My thought process when looking at join.app.net

1. Who the fuck is Dalton Caldwell?

2. Why can't they just use kickstarter?

3. Who do they think is going to pay $50 a year for something that Facebook and Google give away for free?

4. Why is their campaign page so saccharine?

5. Why go from having no control to having implicit control (because you're paying for it), when clearly the best solution would be to have full control (and pay for it)?

5a. I can get hosting for $60 a year, $10 more than join.app.net is going to cost me. I'm sure if it caught on, I could get a 'join.app' instance hosted for much less than that.

So here's the solution - write a spec for a protocol that lives on top of HTTP. Polish the spec. Publish the spec. Write to the spec, be first to market, and sell 'join.app' instances at $12/year. Profit wildly.

We all know an ad supported Internet cannot thrive, but free-to-fifty is not a jump that 99.99% of users are going to be willing to make.

To address #2, they explain why they can't use kickstarter in the FAQ.

I read the Kickstarter ToU, and I didn't see anything that would explicitly or implicitly prevent a campaign of this nature.

Fully agree with these suggestions. Plus the the big question is still why the end product should be more successful than Diaspora, which apparently attracts only a very niche audience. Some sort of freemium model could probably work well and I am surprised that very few (non-work) related social networks have made used of that.

I think $50 is fair for a yearly subscription to a service such as Twitter, which has no other source of revenue. I spend way more time on Twitter per day than watching Netflix and Netflix costs almost twice as much per year.

The article addresses the price with a number of different solutions to lower it, in one case to $1, initially, as to gain critical mass.

> I think $50 is fair for a yearly subscription to a service such as Twitter,

Now you just need to find 10,000 other people that feel the same way as you do.

Haha, very true. That's why it isn't working. The initial price needs to be much lower to reach their goal. Over time, as the service grows, I think $50 is eventually a fair price. But, way too much for a fledgling service with unclear benefits to the user.

They frame the benefits of their platform with too much ideology and too little practicality.

Developers can be very ideological, but when it comes to spending money, even we have to be somewhat practical.

The question in my mind, when I looked at their website, was "What can I build with this?" That's a question that should be answered by their pitch.

It would be a much more convincing pitch if they listed a few example application ideas and discussed the role that app.net would play in the implementation.

But as it stands, I can't really see what architectural pain point is solved by join.app.net, that couldn't be better solved by existing solutions like RSS, that are far less expensive to host.

Fatigue? Apathy? Both?

It seems Twitter has not exactly turned out to be what everyone had hoped, which has probably dampened the enthusiasm. Also, it seems the long-term goal is to build an API with no mention of what happens afterwards.

So, aside from crowdfunding, how is app.net a long-term business?

Anyone can write a good-bad-indifferent API and publish the standard, but what differentiates these guys from some other api that does exactly the same thing?

I'm guessing people don't want to fork down the money!

True. I think it is probably too expensive for most people, especially since it isn't built yet.

I was really hoping this would really gain traction. Can you think of any other reasons for the slow campaign?

users don't like to pay for anything. Advertisers do.

It’s a shame people are so averse to paying for anything online. For $2-4 a month, they could ultimately get a much better experience on a social network over the long term. Mind you, people spend lots of time, sometimes hours a day, on these networks. You’d think they wouldn’t mind a small fee for them considering how much people pay for cable, Netflix, etc.

It's just the mindset that companies have given them - to rely on advertisers to fund free services.

There's so many ad based websites out there, we often think that paid websites have an ad-supported alternative. Though, the ones which don't and are exceptionally compelling will gain genuine customers.

But how many companies are that?

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