App.net Response to Brennan Novak, part II
blog.app.net
blog.app.net
The only thing missing from all of this is for someone like Dalton to actually say "We are building a paid blogging platform." When App.net was initially described, it sounded like "This will be just like Twitter, but you will pay for it." And that never made sense.
It seems to me they now have the infrastructure to support several business models that people might actually pay for (blogs, private chat rooms, etc) but if anyone at App.net has said what the intended business model is, then I missed the announcement.
They're trying to implement something where you sign up once, as a user, and you can use multiple apps on top of it, and in all these apps you'll have the same data (your friends, messages, etc), yet unlike facebook, they're not blocking apps or limiting the API or putting adds in your news stream, or deliberately removing friends' posts from your news stream so that others have to pay in order to appear in your stream again.
Didn't Dalton market App.net as a response to Twitter rate limits and taking away features?
By making a paid API, he's essentially moving in the right step. But there's 1 problem: his system will never have the data that a network like Twitter or FB has. What good is a paid search API when I'll only get 10 "tweets" a min?
Also, this idea stems from a time, a couple of years ago, where some people used to consider twitter a sort of data platform and not a social media platform. The fantastic api allowed people to hack together gadgets that used the twitter api to communicate with other gadgets, people used it as an api channel for real time chess games, etc. That's what Twitter, the platform, was in the eyes of many people. While Twitter nowadays sees itself as something entirely different. In the platform-kind-of-way, the tweets are not imporant, they're only one example of what could be done on top of the API.
App.net is for the general consumer that's not going to be able to run their own server stack. If you can run your own server stack, you can use all these open standards outlined in this blog posts to consume the data and do what you like.
There's even a http://dev-lite.jonathonduerig.com/ so you don't need to pay anything to tinker with their API.
One could also argue that less data means less noise and more signal. Also the data on app.net is more structured (see their annotation implementation).