How App.net Can Change Everything

This is, I suspect, a drawback of the Kickstarter mode of operation: The momentum cycle is out of step with reality. When you're fundraising you have to build the excitement to a big wave - a wave which, judging by this post, is still building in many people's fertile imaginations.

The excitement is important: It focuses people and gets them talking and causes them to want to keep the party going. And if you're, say, Apple, you strive to kick off the excitement at a time when you can feed the ensuing wave of interest with a steady stream of finished, profitable products that people can buy and use and show to their friends.

But with these Kickstarter-y projects the product is never finished when the hype peaks, so there's inevitably going to be a crash of excitement during the long doldrum where nothing seems to be happening. In fact, what's happening is that the builders are doing the work that you've paid them to do, but the creation of actual working product is so much less exciting than the brainstorming phase. Especially when the product is experimental.

But that's how this works, so it is essential to calm down. It's tinkering time, people! Whiteboards and screwdrivers! The Age of Aquarius was not built in a week.

But then he goes on to say: "A fundamental misunderstanding about the App.net platform so far has been that there will never be any ads running anywhere on the platform. I believe that is incorrect. What is correct is that there will never be any ads run on Alpha or anywhere else to fund the the operations of App.net the company."

It sounds to me that if things go the way Orian says, app.net will be fundamentally the same thing as AWS, where developers pay a service provider to make their life easier. The difference will be that in app.net's case, "concepts like users, posts, connecting and sharing" will be supported through "a scalable infrastructure and a base model".

But economically, the forces will be exactly the same. Application creators will be motivated to create free apps just as they are today, and to support them by advertising, just as they are today. And in order to earn advertising revenue that enables them to compete with their non-app.net competition, they'll want to target advertisements as efficiently as possible. So they'll have the same pressures to play games with user privacy.

The end result will be that app.net WILL be funded through ad revenue, to the same degree that AWS is, since the developers that pay for either of these services often make their revenues through advertising.

I don't see how the outcome will be any different from the traditional one from the user privacy point of view, unless app.net provides fundamental privacy restrictions that are rigid enough that these businesses can't compete financially with businesses not running on app.net, which doesn't sound like a viable model for app.net.

While I have paid my $50 to sign up for app.net, I'm not exactly feeling a lot of confidence in this model. But I haven't spent an enormous time studying it, and maybe I'm missing something fundamental. If so, what is it?

  It is the brainchild of Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg, co-founders of Mixed Media Labs. The vision for App.net was crystalized as an audacious proposal from Dalton after [...]

  The most interesting social applications we’ll see in the next phase of the web will be built on App.net.

Reddit took traffic from Digg because Digg 4.0 was a horribly bloated implementation. Facebook took traffic from Myspace because Myspace was a complete and utter mess on par with Geocities. Google took traffic from Altavista and Yahoo because their service was just plain better.

Ads are rarely ever a reason that users swap services, and because your average user doesn't care AT ALL about the trials and tribulations of developers who are trying to make a buck off the APIs of those companies, they aren't going to care about App.net products either.

Its cool and stuff for developers...

But did anyone actually think of the other 500 Million people who are supposed to use this ?

Because you don't want to lock free users out entirely, but on the other hand, having your users also be your customers is better for everyone in the long run.

So if someone comes with a P2P twitter clone, that would be something: - no advertising - no censoring (china!) - large cache of tweets stored for offline viewing - all kinds of additional services could connect, like history logs, searching, discovery, notifications.

A drawback would be the lack of speed, as p2p networks have delays, obviously. But this could be overcome at least partly by making followers also p2p neighbors, me thinks.

PG suggested having the balls to disrupt Google Search itself, by building a new search platform, only for the top 10,000 über-geeks in tech. PG believes done properly, this will scale a new search engine, which he thinks is woefully needed.

That's what Dalton's doing, except to Facebook and Twitter. Responding to PG's call to be bold. And he's nailing it.

Right now, the App.net ecosystem is 10,000+ of the tech's finest minds. It feels like a private Path network, with private access to many of the top minds in tech. A myriad of heavyweight tech talent are in their voicing their support, struggling to fix social.

It's a great place to read tech. It's one of the best geek parties on earth. Twitter has lost the ability to do that "intimately for a small conference of 10,000 advanced minds".

By the way - App.net is not Twitter. The core blackbox (App.net) is an engine to build any construct upon, including (but not limited to) Twitter innovation.

The current client, a 'referential implementation' (which looks like Twitter ... Orian calls it Alpha) is only a proof of concept by Dalton, to show one excellent construct on top of the broader App.net engine.

I think Dalton has nailed PG's challenge, and innovators want in on the fun.