Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

The element that techdirt overlooks, and that I think they did their community (and themselves) a disservice by not mentioning, is the privacy element.

Because selling your personal details is a (relatively) invisible intrusion (unless the provider really screws up, ala Beacon) - there is a significant cost to the user (that cares about privacy) that is not visible to them. App.net is aligned only with the users from that position. There is _no_ incentive for them to resell their user's private information.

With regards to advertising - clearly that has to do with your pain points regarding advertising. We've heard lots of feedback from people who say they don't mind the advertising on Facebook, or twitter. These people also might even watch commercial television.

For those of us who stopped watching commercial television a decade ago (before "cutting the cable" was in vogue), who run ad-block religously, and are offended by "kmart specials" appearing in our twitter stream - we clearly have already reached our pain point, and are looking for something new.

For those people - App.net will be a consistent, long term, ad free, communications infrastructure.

There may only be 10,000 or so people there, and the other 5million (50 million? 500 million?) people may be on twitter. But, unlike Facebook, where it's important that all of your high-school friends, ex-girlfriends, aunts, nieces, classmates, and party-goer-chums are on the same site - I'm quite happy to leave them all behind and follow a small core of interesting technical people without distraction.

So I was thinking about this recently: do companies actually "sell" your personal details to advertisers?

A practical example: let's say I run a cooking website, where users log in and share recipes, vote and comment on them etc.

I (the site owner) store your votes, and comments, as well as track what recipes you view.

From this I (still the site owner) can learn things about you. If you're always viewing lots of chicken recipes, I an make the assumption you're a fan of chicken. I can also note that the recipes that you view and like are "upper class", requiring expensive ingredients.

Now an advertiser for a large Chicken producer could come to me, and want to advertise its new Free Range chickens. They (the advertiser) asks me to display an ad for all people who like chickens and like expensive tastes. So I (the site owner) do this, and you (a user) see the ad.

At no point has the advertiser learnt anything about my users, or had any direct knowledge of my users and their preferences. It's a completely one-way transaction.

So if I was writing a recipe website and I wanted to fund it with advertising, that's how I'd do it. I'd probably give some kind of iTunes dynamic playlist / email filter style UI where you get to pick the types of people your ad gets seen by, but at no point would the advertiser actually learn anything about those people.

Is this still considered "selling your personal details"? Or are companies like Facebook and (presumably) Twitter actually essentially handing over their DBs?

When people say that Facebook "sells your data," they're (charitably) engaging in hyperbole to strengthen their rhetorical point, or (less charitably) lying. Facebook shows ads to the users they're targeted to, without sharing the users' details or identities with advertisers.

Have app.net people clarified if they would be okay if the service only had 10,000 users at its stabilization point?

I know you'd be okay with it but so far, we don't have much from them stating the same. The default of course is that a service that peeks at 10,000 users is headed to dead pool. This is a bit different with 10K paid users but that is still not much in terms of providing financial security to the company to not require funding or other creative ways to monetize.

So my question is simple to app.net folks: if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company?

> if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company?

This is entirely dependent on opportunity cost--ie, whats their take-home pay, and whats the real commitment?

I'd they are just in it for the ideology, then I fully expect then to run the company as a non profit. Oh, they aren't are they? They want to make money too? And they're trying to convince people that they're in it for openness and all that? If they made App.net into a Wikipedia style foundation, I would have gladly jumped on board. But instead they're just trying to create an angle to justify a twitter clone. I can build my own twitter clone. I don't need to pay App.net for that. I have yet to see anything original about this idea. They're just trying to profit on a rather limited crowd of tech people. If it was such a great idea, then the VCs would be throwing money at them. And no, they didn't turn it down-- it isn't there because their business model won't scale. There's only a limited amount of social network inbreeding that can happen before a niche paid network runs out of cousins.

I'm actually okay with twitter only having 12 users (plus me) - just as long as they are the correct 12 users. So far, 5 of the 12 have committed to using App.net.

I'm a relic though - I make a lot of use of skype-chat/AIM/SMS/iMessaging for my DMing - very little goes through @messages on twitter. For those who do all their messaging on twitter, broad uptake might be more important.

I'm hoping that App.Net establishes an equilibrium somewhat similar to to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL - in which a dedicated paying community of 5,000 to 10,000 is more than enough for viability - particularly as I think this 5-10K users will be among the most interesting on the internet, and will almost certainly avoid the "September Problem."

Regardless - it's something new, with a working Alpha, with an API, and an interesting group of people, lead by someone with a track record of Getting Things Done. The next year, at the very least will be interesting.

"There is _no_ incentive for them to resell their user's private information."

The incentive is whatever someone else would pay for it. That may not be worth much currently compared to getting to claim to be above all that, but is your information permanently safe there? Do you trust that App.net will always be managed by the same people in the same way? I haven't seen this addressed much by proponents of the "be the customer, not the product" mantra. It would be very easy for someone to be both a customer and a product.

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