Ad-Free Social Platform App.net Raises Another $2.5M From Andreessen Horowitz
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The way that app.net did this originally was by charging it's monthly fee.
It was actually very difficult for me to find a pricing scheme for the site this time around. So what's the plan to normalize the business? What else besides not adding advertising or something of that nature? Tax developers? Tax users?
It isn't just a "gimped facebook clone", the App.net service is a framework for developers to build a multitude of social networks on top of a single platform. The microblogging aspect was just the easiest "get" for them out of the gate. You can look at their One Year post [0] if you want to see a list of everything that they've implemented.
[0]: http://blog.app.net/2013/08/14/we-are-just-getting-started/
People paid for a Twitter clone and just got a confused mess of hand wavy nonsense about being a general purpose pipe for applications.
I love app.net, but I never use it; brass tacks, most people are still on Twitter (which is itself a small player compared to Facebook). I'm rooting for Caldwell and I applaud what he's going for, but it's going to take some very clever disruption and/or pivoting to unentrench or sidestep the social momentum of Facebook and Twitter (even Google with its billions isn't really cracking that nut). Federation would be the best approach; it's just a shame that that the nuances of social networks make it a much tougher problem than with email or the web.
One potential path might be to integrate with hardware and offer some sort of "self-hosted identity as a service", an encryption-heavy digital break-out box that provided web, email, distributed social network, Dropbox-style app integration, etc. The initial buyers would the people nervous about recent spying revelations, but if the UX was compelling enough, it might have enough other consumer benefits to cross over. I can dream, anyway. :)