Daring Fireball: App.net
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Twitter feels like work to read and "maintain" and we're always told we have to maintain it. Facebook feels like a cesspool. I've been focused on spending time each day on learning new skills (and relearning old ones) and I'm enjoying it far more than I ever enjoyed social networking, and I'm actually getting something out of it. When I want to read something, I either come to HN or I read a book (a good book is worth at least 10,000 tweets or 1,000 blog posts, so what is really the point of all those endless tweets?)
I sometimes try to imagine the people I truly respect (the authors and inventors and scientists) spending all kinds of time on Twitter and Facebook and I keep failing.
Take people like Gruber, though, who now integrate this type of social service into their work - it is now really important to them. And of course they will communicate to us that "hey, this is really important!".
I'd say for most of us ("the general public"), it's just not that important.
Earlier this year I took one month off twitter completely. Before that I was scared to miss a tweet. I would wake up a read through what I missed while I was asleep. But after a few days of not using it I didn't feel I needed it. I may have been a few hours late hearing about the latest 'big' tech story but that was all.
After one month I went back to using it but a few days ago I decided to shut it off again. Even if you follow interesting people, and you want to hear their ideas, you still have to wade through a lot of crap. For example, one thing a lot of people post if baby photos. Why post photos of your child to a public service where you are being followed mostly by strangers? So, even if you are careful who you follow there are still noise control issues.
I could image Facebook being the same for me if I wasn't so careful about who I friend. Recently I tried their subscriber feature and subscribed to tech bloggers, news pages etc. After a few days I felt like never using Facebook again. After removing those subscriptions are bringing it down to just my close friends again it was fine. Largely because Facebook's noise controls are better. They auto created lists for me (School friends, close friends, acquaintances) and made it easy to say what type of updates I wanted from each person.
Regarding app.net I don't think it will succeed. But even if it does get off the ground and get a decent number of users I don't see the need for another social network. It seems like the reason for it to exist is the API and the fact they promise not to screw over developers. But developers aren't going to build apps and use the API if there are only a few thousand people on the network. They will go where the people (and money) are - Twitter and Facebook.
I think the founders should be more actively looking for funding on other channels, if they want to fill up that bar. HN seems like a saturated market.
And to Gruber's pitch, is it because he has a vested interest, financially? Is his "backing" that he pitches it for others to financially contribute?
Apple's brand and future success then depends on you loving the product, which means they spend a lot of the money you've given them on hiring smart and dedicated people to build more loveable products. It's a virtuous cycle.
But most web-era companies (like Google and Facebook) have adopted a different business model: you get their product for free, with the trade-off being that you have to look at a few ads here and there.
The problem with this approach is that they end up hiring more smart and dedicated people to work on advertising techniques, sales, UI, algorithms, &c. than those who actually work on building ever more loveable product. (And they might even IPO at a high valuation, putting even more pressure on the company to deliver advertising revenue growth.)
App.net is trying to get back to the virtuous cycle of people paying for nice products – that has been the standard in commerce since the beginning – so that they can concentrate on making a great, benign product as opposed to spending the future fretting about 'monetization' (think about how awkward that word really is!) or advertising.
It's a trend I'd love to see more of, and I hope that everybody here gives backing a second thought.
EDIT 1: Gruber obviously carries some sway, the total grew by $1850 in the last 10 minutes.
EDIT 2: To continue the above, the total grew by $15000 in the last 2 hours.
Is it so simple? Does anyone actually believe that Apple considers the transaction complete when you walk away with your shiny new Apple device?
They want to be your content middleman. They want to force you to shop in their store. They want to push the iAds service. I get emails from Apple pushing books and movies and iPads for universities and so on literally nightly. They have a store full of apps trying to foist smurfberries on the kids of unsuspecting parents naive enough to implement an App Store passwords.
I like the general concept -- I was one of the earliest and most fervent proponents of micropayments as opposed to advertising driven sites -- but the dichotomy presented is false. Businesses don't act like that. I pay my cable company for cable and they keep sending me magazine subscriptions. I buy a $40,000 car and they try to foist services (XM Radio, OnStar) on me, and then they try to sell the data about me to interested parties.
The world is a very complex place. Twitter and Google wouldn't exist without their users, and anyone who pushes the simplistic "if you aren't paying you're the product being sold" line has a position that only has merit if you don't actually think about it for long.
Of course Gruber carries weight, which is why I asked about his personal "investment" in this -- he seems to essentially be putting his reputation behind something that is almost certain to fail.
Apple is way over toward the "pay for the product" end of the spectrum, and conversely Twitter are committed to the "selling the users' attention" business model.
Even if the difference is not clear cut, people who like Gruber expressly favour one side have reason to want more of the kind.
I don't see why his express opinions are always second guessed. (e.g. Does he own Apple stock? Is he concerned about Google?)
Is it so implausible that he actually believes what he says he believes? Why?
I try to avoid blowing the buddycloud trumpet (we're building an open federated/distributed social network) on hn each time there is a future-of-twitter post. Sorry - I can't hold back this time. Here's my context for reading this app.net post:
Twitter works in the same way the old AOL client did: you accessed some message boards and stock prices and film websites using AOL keywords. Marketers flocked to AOL to put up the latest movie premier website.
At the same time there was the small techno-elite downloading Mosaic 0.98 over their SLIP connection and starting to experiment with the "world wide web". In comparison with the closed systems like Compuserve and AOL, the open web took much longer to evolve becasue everybody was working on different parts without any central coordination. It was this lack of central coordination that brougt us a more robust system and I don't think that any of us will argue for a world where AOL is the gold standard of finding, hosting and accessing content.
Twitter is pushing hard to be the gold standard of messaging in the same way that AOL did. And are marketers flocking to work with Twitter along with newscasters giving out hashtags and @twitter-names.
But, in the backrooms and basements and hackerspaces of the internet, today's equivalent of Mosaic downloaders are experimenting with open, distributed social networks like buddycloud.
The buddycloud team and everyone who attends our hackathons that are working to build the post-Twitter future just like Netscape helped launch the open web.
The future will not be build around one company, but a couple of companies like buddycloud can help nudge it forward. The future will be protocol based rather than homesteading on another company's API for fear of API key revocation.
So to app.net,
I see them fitting into the twitter ecosystem like a paid email provider that doesn't let you send email outside of their domain: You are still tied to one company. Still tied into hoping your API key doesn't get revoked. To move away from Twitter, we must think bigger: a giant network like email where everyone can run their own servers and they all interconnect.
We're trying to solve some of these problems with buddycloud. And props to the buddycloud team, I think they are doing a great job. I'll go back to biting my toungue on each new future-of-twitter post.
A couple of suggestions
- Feature your screencast prominently on the front page.
- Provide nginx install instructions
I hope I can find time soon to experiment with it (which is an additional takeaway, I guess).
I'd love someone to test this https://buddycloud.org/wiki/Buddycloud_nginx_setup and provide feedback about what else is needed to get bc running on nginx. And also about the best way to manage presenting of the CA certs in Nginx.
This service is more privacy-sensitive than Facebook! You should sign up!
This service is less dickish than Twitter! You should sign up!
Sure, it's possible to unseat an entrenched juggernaut. But you don't beat a MySpace unless you're, well, a Facebook. You can't best the incumbent on one factor alone. You have to build an experience that is so radically more compelling that people will actually give up their existing network on the old product just to use yours. And that kind of product is a genuine rarity.
Most users of twitter are not developers, they get their value from the free frontend. Developers are complaining because they don't have access to the data. So they want non-developers to pay so they can have data for free. These non-developers dont really see any value in giving data to developers.
app.net wants to sell a story, but it wants people to pay for it. Duckduckgo is also selling a story but for free which is why its doing so well. If DDG pitch was pay us money for a privacy concerned SE then it to would have miserably failed.
(this is not a prediction that app.net will fail, I really hope it works)
If a startup raise a massive amount of funding with no revenue model, a lot of people here scream bubble.
Now you have a startup that has a revenue model and not seeking additional funding, people still keep leaving snarky comments.
There is a big difference if a company makes money from users vs advertisers.
Companies focus on what gives them revenue and I'm excited to see what App.Net can create if they focus just on the users.
What advantage does app.net have over the mainstream options if I don't care about privacy/'dickishness' and how is that worth $50 to me?
Though I think you misunderstand daltons focus. You say it isnt about "what gives them revenue" but actually that's exactly what it is. The only difference is he is not taking it from the developers, advertisers or selling data but directly from the user. That is not focusing on the user for me. That's raising revenue from the user.
The reason I want app.net to succeed is because I want to live in a world where facebook is free (so everyone i know is on it) but I can choose to pay them $50 (or any reasonable amount) per year so I dont see ads and they don't sell my data. I want to be able to interact with people who don't want to pay $50 per year, otherwise its just a walled garden like every other.
If App.Net does that, they have to optimize the site for both ad-based and subscription revenue models.
To me it seems like the App.net gents are playing this power to the people angle just as a hook to justify funding for a twitter clone.
I can make a twitter clone (and an API to go with it) in less than a weekend. If I wanted it to be beautiful, my buddy and I could spend a month of evenings working on it and it would cost us no more than the price of the beers.
I am starting to think that this entire thing is a scam. A publicity stunt to convince people to pay $50 for something that could be built by following the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial and the Service Oriented Design with Ruby book.
This whole project is too much "inside baseball" the user on the street doesn't care, doesn't want to care because it really doesn't solve any problem for them. A pay-per-tweet platform? C'mon, who actually thinks that has business potential? Especially if just a few people are using it. None of my friends are on it. So what value is the "social" component to me? I don't know a single person on App.net, so why the heck would I spend my development time building some "robust" app atop of a platform that no one is using? You get 10 million users and then I'll potentially care about the API.
If the early members of App.net built a great community and become a good resource, regular people would pay for it.
I think there's a vast, vast difference between the two.
If Caldwell actually cared about making "a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers" he'd build something on status.net, or at least something open source.
I disagree.
When making a business, your paying customer is the one you serve. If App.net goes for charging users and developers, they'll (logically) focus on those exact people.
I'm more disagreeing with the notion that a product can't be for users/developers if he is charging them for it.
There is of course nothing wrong with making money :D
What am I supposed to be looking at?
(I'm also a backer of app.net)
http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-psychology-of-entrep...
This experiment provides a huge number of people a way to say "well, if there were actually X people on the service then sure, I'd also become a dedicated user". If they hit their goal, all those people will have paid enough that they feel emotionally attached to justifying their decision via using the service.
It just might work. A service doesn't need to have EVERYONE, it just has to have enough people to be more interesting for all its participants than the alternative.
Whereas without this fundraising period, the first people in are going to say "I'm the first person in, if I pay $50 there's nobody else to talk to", and... then nobody becomes the first to pay it. (Well not nobody, but few people.)
(Yes, I'm a backer.)
I really root for app.net to succeed, also somebody please come up with a better Facebook, too much identity info managed by these two companies to feel a little unease, specially after their privacy fiascos.
When talking with VCs, mass-market and transaction-based is always a tough sell. So why not try a funding drive that might not succeed, but show a good amount of interest? You get 2 things out of it:
a) Contacts of people actually wanting to buy your product and are vocal about it. b) Proof that there is interested in your concept.
Especially in the social network space, where fees are something rather unheard of, you won't be able to sell "like Twitter, but with payed accounts" very well. Then again, I regularly meet people that would like to pay for their Twitter account for certain benefits (like being able to verify their account instead of hoping that Twitter deems their request worthy). So this funding drive looks like a proof-of-concept to me much more than a success or die action.
Their interface was nice. They want to build a third-party friendly ecosystem but still base it on ads, I wonder how...
Nobody knows what will result here but Twitter has been worsening of late so it's worth a shot IMHO.
Thanks!
Good luck guys
App.net as a name makes absolutely no sense (and not like other senseless names like Wii or whatever, but as in it already means something else) and quite frankly I'm shocked that people like Gruber and Marco are on board with this ridiculous bound to fail idea.
Also why on earth they adopted the Kickstarter model instead of the Pinboard.in model is beyond me. Can only imagine they got a lust for instant #swag
I would derive value from pinboard if I was the only subscriber. The same cannot be said for a social network like app.net.
I joined Twitter in September 2006, but I didn't start really using it until December 2006 when some friends and colleagues signed up.
Only then you will have total developer freedom, and no censorhip possible.
If you've also been thinking about this for the last 2 weeks, drop a line.
Think of IRC evolved (message horizon based on #tags not rooms, just like Twitter), syndicated, P2P Server Network, served over HTTP to the end user so that it has all of what Twitter has to offer (maybe a few more characters)
would love to think together with people who like tough challenges about a new HTTP on top of P2P architecture to solve this and other problems to leave a new arm of the internet for our kids.
How do you avoid Marketers disguised as developers?
You will still get the ads no matter what one way or another.
I think it's fine if marketers use the service. It's similar to Twitter in that you can choose who you follow. The difference is that if I want Coke in my timeline, I have to follow Coke (or someone cleverly disguised as not Coke) in my follow list.
If companies add their brand to app.net, fine. If people opt-in to follow those brands, also fine. No harm to everyone else.