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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

App.net will get lots of hackers and people in our community, but in terms of reaching critical mass ... I don't think it will work.

People join twitter now out of societal pressure. "What is this thing? What is this ad on the subway that says I should follow them on twitter? Who's this athlete that is now Kobe Bryant with a strange @username at the end of his name?"

Developers, techy individuals, and people who consume twitter at a high level are more inclined to pay for it.

People who casually use it to help trend the latest hashtag about #whatmenreallywantfromawoman could care less. They're not going to pay a yearly fee for this, especially when the line between this and twitter is very blurry.

p.s. I am an app.net user and own a copy of netbot.

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That's like saying that John Deere won't be a successful company because most people won't buy tractors.

Sort of. The perception is that app.net is going up against Twitter. In your comparison, that's like saying that John Deere can outsell Ford.

However, the more realistic view is that app.net will remain a niche service, but one that suits techies very well. So, yes, John Deere will corner the market in tractors, but never branch out to cars.

Your perception and inference are both wrong. App.net isn't just going up against twitter, but rather the entire social networking paradigm where I have multiple signups and not enough use. If we use app.net to login to most major services and post, like I have to do with twitter, facebook and linkedin right now, I get away with a single login.

What'll drive adoption? The developer incentive program. This also answers your John Deere example... There will be a lot of offsprings from App.net. In a rudimentary tone - a fb-clone, an instagram clone, comments systems (bit.ly/qbdebut)etc...

I talked about Twitter specifically because the OP talked about Twitter specifically.

I don't doubt that there will be lots of offsprings from app.net, I'm just dubious about whether they'll gain any traction. "You only have to use one username/password!" isn't enough to get people to spend $5 a month.

I don't think that app.net is selling an identity service that will take off or be worthwhile, but I strenuously disagree with the assertion that people won't pay for single sign in on the Internet.

It is, in my opinion, the number one pain point on the web today. It affects users of all technical levels and the more you have invested in the web the worse it gets.

Ah, single sign-in... also offered by Twitter, Facebook, Google, Firefox, my email address...

I don't disagree that people might pay for it, but why would it by App.net I'd pay? Why would they even pay though? You can trust the App.net developers? No more than those listed, realistically.

Sounds like an opportunity to charge people to set up their OpenID and use your revenue to get more companies to implement it.

Disclaimer: I don't know much about building websites and I don't understand why OpenID hasn't got more traction.

If OpenID was a tractor, we would need to have a PHD in astrophysics to understand how to drive it successfully.

No, it's like saying that John Deere won't be successful because a competitor is giving out Nascar tractors for free.

That's like saying app.net makes similar revenue per user as John Deere from a sale of a tractor.

A tractor is useful to a person just from buying it… app.net is only useful to a person if enough other people also buy it.

Your vehicle analogy completely falls apart and really on Hacker News do we have to simplify tech products down to car analogies…

The crux is how you define "critical mass". Dalton originally defined it as 10k users. He basically said that with 10k users you can have an interesting Twitter-like service.

Others are quick to point out that it will never reach Twitter-scale. There will never be a point where 90% or probably even 50% of the people you think matter on Twitter today are on ADN.

It's pretty clearly destined to be somewhere in between, and the question becomes what utility can you get out of that? Obviously the breadth of Twitter's firehose data is off the table, but you also have a lot higher signal to noise ratio, the benefits of a smaller community, and a practical means to fend off the Eternal September.

Can ADN be useful without ubiquity? I'm hoping to test the theory that finding the right 200 people to follow on ADN will give me everything I got from Twitter and more, even if they are not the 200 most interesting people on Twitter.

So, because Dalton defined it as 10k, then it must be so?

Go back and re-read my comment and explain to me how you got that conclusion from what I said.

I'm not saying App.Net is going to reach critical mass but your argument is pretty much the same thing people said about Twitter back in 2007.

Twitter is free. App.net is not.

NO WAY! Whoa, mind blowing insights.

It's also what people said about the hundreds of services that failed in 2007.

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