Comment by simondlr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simondlr | Hacker News Reader

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The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. The result is, as Dalton mentioned that they HAVE to cater for their users who are the same people who pay them. If your users are your customers, you've got an easier game to play.

As a developer, I'm a lot more excited about it. I backed mainly because I was so excited about an API that could've been what Twitter promised. I'm especially excited to see what annotations is going to emerge through it. To explain it in short: Any app can now embed any information in a post. This is big. To give a small example: Say people who allow IFTTT to post their music to app.net. IFTTT can decided to add meta information to it (adding song titles, artists, etc). Now anyone else can easily extract this information.

There is a whole underlying network waiting to be discovered. Anything can now live within in it. What if you wanted to do an instagram type app? Ask users with app.net accounts to log in. When they post a photo, add your own information to it (photo title, photo url, etc).

In the normal app.net (alpha) interface, you won't miss anything. You'll just see someone posting a photo. However, now this new instagram type app can extract this information from a user's feed, using app.net's infrastructure as their social backbone! Any social service can live on app.net's infrastructure now.

>The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads.

IMO, the people who care about ads on social networking have Adblock+ installed. I would even go so far as to throw this (very probably unsourcable statement) and say that most users don't care about ads, period. The one thing that pulls me to social networking is people, not the ads. A social network isn't social or a network if there aren't people I know or care about using it.

You didn't read the next sentence. It is not inherently ads that are the problem, it is the fact from a company's perspective you have to cater to a) the advertisers who are paying you money vs b) your users who aren't.

Currently, I'm okay in paying $50 to get access to a great community of early adopters (lets admit, it is mostly tech people). I'm not naive to expect it won't change, but once killer apps start popping up on the ecosystem, more users will join which will bring back the value that the older social networks provided.

To expand on simondlr's point, Twitter will optimize the site for maximum exposure of ads, not user's status updates.

The highest paying ads will surface to the top over the highest quality status updates.

This indicates that you think Twitter is stupid, and will make their product suck so much that people will stop using it. I don't see any evidence for that. Did the promise of ad revenue make Google destroy its search engine?

Twitter's success is a function of the emergent behaviour of users and applications built off the platform (including, but not limited to 3rd party clients).

They're now trying to freeze innovation and homogenise us. That's the real killer, not the ads (although the ads are shit too).

Sure, it'll be ok for many people in the future. But it probably won't be the Twitter that I and others want. What's wrong with trying an alternative?

There's nothing wrong with trying App.net. Quite the contrary. I just don't understand why this community doesn't seem to be applying its characteristic skepticism to this idea.

There's been plenty of skepticism, especially at the start (IMO). I think the successful funding is at least a signal that there might be something here.

I think that this really is going to reveal is that dichotomy between users as product and users as customer is a false one.

It's an interesting alternate perspective that has somehow gained the force of common wisdom without the evidence to support it. On a service like Twitter, the users are both customer and product, as five minutes of objectively clear thought would show.

App.Net make succeed or it may fail, but it won't be because of this issue.

I agree.

I hate adverts, but I think app.net is unlikely to topple FB or Twitter in the social sector.

Myspace is a warning to Twitter and FB, if you don't look after your users, improve your service and keep them happy then you the advertisers will leave too.

Sure the advertisers are a force that doesn't necessarily align with the users, but this is something the people running the network have to mitigate, because it isn't in their intrests to piss off their users.

That being said, I think advertising is in a bubble, so from that perspective app.net has an advantage.

Yes. Yes it did. I would easily pay $50 annually if I could get pure c.2010 Google with all the Boolean operators and none of the social bullshit. I deliberately stopped clicking on anything ad-related as soon as they screwed everything up after G+ launched (and stepped up my AdBlock+ filters), so I think they'd make more off of me by selling pure 'premium' search or something.

Sorry but that's crazy.

Twitter is NOT going to compromise the integrity of the entire site for ads. Google haven't. Facebook haven't. Microsoft haven't. And thousands of other sites haven't.

Google has. Facebook had nothing to compromise. Microsoft... now you're trolling.

As for Twitter... they've done better than most, so far. But at some point, they'll have more pressure to show revenue. And then... how do they make money, again?

I disagree. If it works, the reason non-developers will join in large numbers will have to do with the services/offerings running atop app.net. I'm in no position to guess what they'll be, but I believe they can and will be developed. And I wouldn't rule out services/bundles that include app.net membership as part of the price. There's a ton of room for innovation.

In the end, people will pay for app.net for quality and for access: ala HBO, satellite radio, etc.

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