App.net, like I need another bug tracker
kerr.io
kerr.io
I got halfway down the page, to the part where he appears to have picked a bug tracker project at random to call "me-too" and compare to a "Pascal for Dummies" exercise (there's a Pascal book somewhere that mentions Twitter? there's a high school that still teaches Pascal?) --- and started asking how something like this had managed to make it to Svbtle.
Then I realized, "oh, it's wp-svbtle, whatever the fuck that is".
This is a design whose entire purpose is to mimic the Svbtle blog network and confuse readers. Every design choice in it, from the duplication of Curtis' (pointless) "Kudos" thingy to the stroke width of the rules, is made not for its own sake but to duplicate the branding of someone else's site.
It's a jerk move all around, not just to Curtis, or to anyone else who has decided to write for Curtis' network, but to readers, who deserve to know at a glance who an author is, or in this case isn't, affiliated with or endorsed by. And because it's an irritatingly obvious jerk move, it does a disservice to the author as well, making their words a sideshow on their own site.
Great job with Svbtle, Dustin. Sorry to see a dupe like this, on WordPress nevertheless!
Seriously, what did you expect? You created something beautiful. You formed a visual brand that associated itself to good writing. You made it exclusive.
People wanted in. They copied it. You can see examples of this from nature (animals imitating visual properties of other animals to make themselves more scary etc) to modern design strategy (using similar colors / fonts to create a subconscious mental association with something).
If you look carefully at Svbtle or almost any other modern blog, it is not hard to reverse engineer the rules that make these things look good: it's simply font size, line width, leading, and minimal ornamentation. Just make a new blog template that follows the same rules. Leave the "Kudos" thing out while you're at it.
This isn't about sticking up for Dustin Curtis' exclusive rights to minimal, readable blog templates. As approximately every detractor of Svbtle has pointed out approximately always, Svbtle isn't the first site to use minimalist black-on-white breathable sans with a faintly ruled sidebar.
This is about sites going out of their way to pretend an affiliation that they don't have. IBM's blog template is horrible. It would be equally annoying and disrespectful to clone it and change the "IBM" to "IBN".
Good, because a "blog network" which is essentially a bunch of blogs with the same look has all the utility of a designer clothing label. Or maybe there is some useful aspect of blogs wearing exclusive uniforms that I'm missing?
The current, most popular post on the svbtle network is Dave McClure, a super angel with his own Wikipedia page, hoping that he's a "late bloomer", not a "loser."
dcurtis' latest post:
I’ve been hearing rumblings which suggest that Flipboard is about to be blocked from Twitter’s API, following Instagram’s blockage last week. What is Twitter thinking?
Literally, that's the entire post.
I really like the actual frontend of svbtle blogs, and the 'ideas v. published' blogging interface seems smart, but the notion that this is some curated uber-network is absurd.
I don't need another social network. I don't need ads removed from my current social feed. I don't need app.net.
If twitter died tomorrow something else would pop up. That's the nature of the space. We don't need it and so we go where there is less friction. Ease of use, ease of joining, and ease of finding those I care about most. That's all that matters.
I see App.net becoming something much like svbtle. A highly curated space much like a country club where only those willing to pay the entry fee are allowed in.
Cool.
As long as the data is available publicly through feeds and other api's it won't matter too much. It's still blogging, it's still tweeting, but now your participants have been restricted. Not as much as Svbtle but enough to encourage a certain atmosphere.
My problem with App.net is that the user payment is only a means to an end no one has explained yet.
I welcome any competition to Twitter to make them step up their game, though, so from a spectator's view, I couldn't be happier to see App.net succeed. As a hypothetical user, the platform holds no appeal to me. I still remember Jaiku, Pownce and Identi.ca.
To be frank, I'd rather have ads be based on my data, because the ads are a lot better.
I guess my only quibble about App.net is that I've never personally seen the appeal of the micro-blogging/twitter social model. I don't like to "follow" people, and I like to say things to other people in more than 140/256 charters. I believe that there is a generally correlation between the length of people's comments/text and their quality.
I would like to see a more integrated real time feed, i.e the music people listen to, the movies they watch, where they eat so that developers can use it to make recommendations to me. That would be awesome as long as I can have fine grained control over who get access to what information.
I am excited to see if App.net is going to go in this direction.
isn't the point that Twitter and Facebook's shitty developer relations are a symptom of their desire to monetise and therefore there is never going to be a time when they have good developer relations?
I think this is the first time I've actually been filled with hatred towards a blog post.
I wouldn't write it off just yet.
Constantly trashing app.net is not seeing the bigger picture. Thankfully, people like Dalton aren't as short-sighted.
"If your senior high school computer science final project wasn’t building an issue tracker or Twitter clone, then your high school either a) didn’t offer computer science classes or b) you were a jock and didn’t take computer science."
Is this really true? My brain immediately turned off when I read this, but then I realized I have no clue what people in high school usually program.
I'll go first: around 14 or 15 I wrote a bytecode compiler for some god awful language that looked like the bastard child of Perl and Javascript... I guess around late high school time I was mainly working on Smogon, a competitive Pokemon website (still around and making money!) and NetBattle, an online simulator for several Pokemon generations (now defunct and replaced by www.pokemonshowdown.com)
So HN, what was your "senior high school project"?
B2B products, like bug trackers, can carve a niche and do rather well with just a few hundred or thousand paid customers. Yes, they're not going to all be Atlassian, but a solo founder charging 1,000 people $30 a month can live very comfortably. And you can drift along for a while and not ultimately give up because "the big guys" are 1000x your size.
B2C products, like app.net, exist on an entirely different plane.
Disclaimer: I run a fairly new project management tool / bug tracker that already has already replaced a considerable amount of my monthly income.
App.net, from where I see, looks like a platform with more developers than users.
Would it be great if App.net flourishes to the point of being a continued relevant tool and site for years? Of course.
But its goals are worth keeping track of and working towards. No need to get so worked up about it against it.
p.s I'm in the app.net alpha.
Step 2: Close your eyes, hit ENTER, count to 10.
Step 3: Open your eyes and count to 10 again.
Step 4: Tell me how that argument still stands.
But dilution isn't the issue anymore. Curtis won: he's built a real blog network, with many very interesting writers. He's got Dalrymple writing about Mac stuff, Justin Kan from Justin.tv, Dave McClure from 500 Startups, and John Collison from Stripe. It's past time people stopped pretending like we're talking about a page of CSS.
I didn't realize he was not part of svbtle, but it does seem like he's trying to claim credibility he hasn't earned by styling his blog as if he were a member. Svbtle is new enough that I don't know if there's much associated credibility, but still.
None of this is relevant to his point, which may as well be made as part of a chorus. Lots of people don't see the value.
I'm not sure being part of Svbtle lends anyone any "credibility".
Whether or not something is part of SVBTLE is about as important a point as whether it's written for Ars Technica, or for ZDNet: that is, not the most important thing about the piece, but by absolutely no means irrelevant.
Also, had this been an actual Svbtle piece, it would have carried the frisson of being a contrarian take on the work of another Svbtle author, since Svbtle is where Dalton Caldwell announced App.net to begin with.
Are we really that insecure? That any time anybody chooses to affiliate selectively in a new way, we have to cast aspersions?