I really only want about a dozen people on Join.App.Net, and most of them are already there. So, for _me_ it just has to scale to twelve people - it just needs to be the right twelve people - and so far it looks good.
Or, more pragmatically: what incentive do I, a person who doesn't really care about 'openness' and uses Twitter for a billion other reasons anyway, have to pay $50 and subscribe to app.net instead of just following the twitter list of those twelve people?
I like to get ahead of the curve.
I use Path, not Facebook. I don't watch commercial TV w/commercials. And I support app.net. Their business model is pretty straightforward - "The user is the customer, not the advertiser."
I like being the customer. That's why I'm paying $50. It's also why I'll migrate off Path to the first company that comes up with a business model that also foregoes selling my information and attention (While, like twitter, it's pretty close to perfect for me right now, I'm sure Path will go downhill - unless they find some ueber clever low-overhead approach akin to what Craigslist has been able to do.)
Today you can follow those 12 people, but if this takes off then it promises a return to the nostalgic '06 and '07 of Twitter when the community was small and everyone there was "interesting". The cognoscenti of tech may well abandon Twitter in favor of this un-walled, membership-only garden.
Now who really should care about this? Certainly not most people. It won't compete with Twitter, but it won't have to because it will have a fraction of the infrastructure costs, and it will avoid the eternal september that plagues every popular free service. This will be a niche product, but if successful it will potentially be highly valuable to that niche, and also it will be quite novel as a paid product of this type has never taken off as far as I know. If you really buy into the hype, you might even think that the success of app.net could signal the high water mark of free services as it becomes apparent just how much better a service can be created when it's paid for directly by users.
I'm not saying I believe any of this, but I do see the potential.
Marco is supporting it but has blatantly said he doesn't think it's going to work out.
Dan Benjamin has echoed Marco's statements and implied that he specifically bought in to reserve a specific user name, which I imagine is just a precaution to protect his business name on a potential new service.
And Grueber... I don't know. I haven't listened to him in a long time.
Anyways, I wouldn't call that overwhelming support. I think it's a lot of tail chasing from a few people.
Why not to use Quora?
Top users and no ads!
;)If App.Net ends up being the 'Hacker News Twitterlike' service, is that a success or failure?
Examples are Google Wave vs Google+. The former felt empty and pointless, while the latter can be interesting because of the number of users, albeit they may not be people you know.
Twitter on the other hand fits in everywhere. People just love to crap out little 160 character nuggets in between everything else they do all day long.
Status.net has evolved into a private twitter for companies but the identica service still runs, still has a user base, and is everything you need for an alternative to twitter.
Or 2012 vs. 2009.
You mean as a reason to choose the former, right?
Regarding ads being not too annoying, people are backing app.net because of the larger goal: creating a service where the user is the customer rather than the product. This allows app.net to focus all of its resources on pleasing the user, and ensures app.net will not try to shut down 3rd party developers who are competing for advertising dollars.
To this end, app.net does not need to become twitter-like scale to create a sustainable business.
Dalton's pretty clear said he's "not trying to kill twitter" see, http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Will-app-net-kill-Twitter/ans...
Could you explain why you think so? I would think that the fact that it is a paid service will reduce the amount of noise in the system and a lot of people would value a social network with less noise.
Looking at the users that are currently using the alpha version you can see that these are mostly tech people - developers, designers, bloggers, artists etc - who are enjoying even the current state, which just has a few hundred users. We don't really mind if the service doesn't scale as Twitter does, that might actually be a good thing. And there are services that proof that paid accounts are a valid and successful way to monetize: look at pinboard.in, for example.
That is not entirely accurate either. In order to have any customers, even by your definition, twitter must continue to have lots of users. So there is already a checks and balance system of sorts in place such that if twitter goes too far in the direction of addressing advertisers while hurting the users, the users may jump ship causing the advertisers to do the same as well.
Twitter enjoys a tremendous popularity because of all those celebrities using the service. I mean celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, not like John Gruber. And that keeps the masses coming to Twitter. It does turn away the tech folks though, the people who used Twitter in its very beginning and which are now turned away by its politics.
* Me.
Wikipedia is free and has no ads, but survives thanks to its "paid members" (i.e., donors). Still open and free of ads for everybody (well, except for that one month that you see Jimmy Wales' banners all the time :)).
Yes, somebody has to pay the bills on app.net. Maybe it'll be 10,000 core hackernews users. If it gets traction, maybe he'll find enough corporate supporters and donors to keep it afloat. Maybe he'll be able to create an ecosystem where devs pay to get premium services, or some revenue sharing model (like Apple/Android).
There's tons of options to make money without having to sell its user base like twitter/fb. That's the approach he's taking.
It's not an easy challenge, but kudos to Dalton for trying. I'm a backer, and a strong supporter of the initiative. Not because I'm against ads (quite the opposite; I work at a marketing agency), but there's a clear conflict of interest between companies whose product is to sell their user base - fb, twitter - versus those that focus on users - wikipedia, dropbox, etc.