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Comment by itafroma | Hacker News Reader

Mat Honan deserves credit for one of the clearest, most concise descriptions of what App.net is (or intends to be):

> Imagine this. You sign up for Vine, and build up a robust friend network and library of videos. But then you try out Instagram’s new video sharing, and decide you like its editing features a lot better.

> Normally, this would mean starting over, with no friends and no files. But let’s say that both of them were just applications that ran on top of App.net. Instead of starting over, when you fired up Instagram for the first time, your friends and videos would be there waiting for you. That’s App.net. Or at least that’s what it wants to be.

Up until I read those two paragraphs, I couldn't shake the notion that it was really a Twitter clone that didn't want to be pigeonholed. Now I get it.

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If App.net it's trying to be a "social backend"... if that IS the case, then their work it's harder than just being a "Twitter alternative". But I'm really hoping they manage to make it!

Huh? I'm actually more confused.

Doesn't Facebook-connect (and FB apps in general) effectively give you the ability to buy/rent their network effect already? Thus eliminating the "no friends and no files" notion?

Yes, but neither Twitter and Facebook are in the "social provider" business - they're in the ad business. This is why they've had so much friction with their 3rd-party developer ecosystem. Dalton wants App.net to be a social utility - providing ownership of social data to the user for a price. There are no ads, so there's no motivation to screw over developers.

That's the idea, at least.

Facebook is picky about which app is allowed to use your data. Twitter, for example, is not allowed to use it anymore. So when you develop an app, just relying on facebook could lead to a situation where you suddenly don't have access to your friends anymore (from within that app). Most apps also have their own user databases and just use facebook data for import. With app.net that's the one point where your user data would be saved.

I had it all wrong. App.net is the new Ning. Or, I still have it all wrong.

Wow. I recall Ning. So many "social networks" on Ning lasted what, an hour? And to think, my boss was secretly orgasiming at the notion of the company bundling private social networks on the cheap through Ning. D'oh.

Except even this doesn't make sense. Presumably Vine handles the videos on its own backend, and you only get your social graph when you move over to Instagram.

Unless you're going to provide free infrastructure for every component (not just the social graph) there will be an element of lock-in to virtually any social product.

App.net's API does providing more than a microblogging API. They have a file hosting (each user has their own quota), permissive messaging (point to point or group), and a search API so you can easily find anything on their system. They're planning to add more useful APIs, such as billing.

Seems like bad business strategy to build on top of those if it means it's easy to steal away your userbase. Sounds fine for mid-size apps who can't justify rolling their own though.

If your only competitive advantage is user lock-in, then you already have a problem. Either you need to get your userbase to grow big extremely fast, or you've already lost.

And if you grow the user-base fast you've won, right? Lock-in and network effects matter enormously. Saying you can't lock-in the social graph neither guarantees a company won't lock-in elsewhere nor guarantees this is an appealing platform on which to develop.

This isn't a morality tale, I'm just pointing out what kind of decisions would be made around App.net and that the Vine/Instagram example doesn't really make sense.

In an ideal world services would give you YOUR data, instead of locking you in, allowing you to easily export all your data -- ideally in an open format -- that could be imported to other services.

It's much worse than that. Exporting and importing does not preserve social connections. You need either federation or a benevolent monopoly.

App.net does provide an account export. But more important they've embraced open standards, see: http://blog.app.net/2013/08/07/response-to-brennan-novak-par...

This type of interoperability combined with sections of their API that are public (tokenless) provide a way to consume App.net content without needing an account unless you want to participate.

Then there are 3rd party apps and additions that bring even more open interoperability.

For development, there is Dev-Lite, so if you want to play around with the API, you don't need to spend $100/year until you're ready to join their Developer Incentive Program. And most Developers that have built anything for app.net have made their $100/year investment.

And App.net's annotation are another great example of creating new open standard of interoperability. These attachments can be added to any App.net API primitive to provide additional structured data to enhance interoperability between developer applications. Here's a link to their document repository for this: https://github.com/appdotnet/object-metadata

Wouldn't those apps just be App.net clients? If you're limited only to what types of media App.net provides, how can you make an innovative app?

Because you can have your own backend that does anything you want, and just uses App.net for the social graph.

You can have your own backend that does anything you want, and is completely opaque and invisible to that oh so valued social graph, because /their/ clients don't support your magic thing.

The fact that you said "clients" instead of "apps" shows that you still don't understand the vision. App.net provides functionality that you can safely build an app on, and which is fundamentally more useful than the sandy foundations of Facebook or Twitter. That functionality is something which is non-trivial and which has potential network effects. You can use that functionality, you can extend it to something private to your own app, or you can mix and match with all the compatibility compromises that would entail. You can do all this safely without worrying that the rug will be pulled out from under you just when you figure out a magic formula that works.

In short, App.net is something with the potential to build a business on, whereas anyone trying to build a serious business (as opposed to just doing something cool) on Twitter is an outright fool at this point.

apps are clients.

what on earth makes you think they are not?

I understand the vision. But I also understand, as someone who has used app.net, in actual fact, simply porting your social graph into a new app does you no good. You still have to convince all your friends to also get that same app before they can see what you post with it. The vision only works with basic media, like text, and photos, posted in a very straightforward twitter-like way.

I'll give you a specific example: Group chat with photos. Yep, there's an app.net app that does that, and now, you can't see the photos unless you have that app. so what's the point? what's in the vision for this situation?

What group chat app is that? If you're talking about photos in patter chat, there's an established annotation for it that most clients can read and use.

Whisper, patter, Netbot doesn't support it. I don't know of any application other than whisper/patter that does.

My basic point is, the app.net vision is fundamentally flawed. It's not just a matter of positioning/marketing. It's the same fundamental flaw that google wave had. The vision is that app.net is a protocol, but you can't market protocols to people. you can only market apps. or more specifically, you can only market specific solutions to specific problems, or some fundamentally human vision (rather than a technological one)

With the app.net vision, any app you get that happens to use app.net as a back end will be subtly and frustratingly broken in some way because there's this feature, or that feature that your friend used that you can't see, because you have the wrong app. There's no commonality, there's no ultimate app that does all the things. With twitter, at least you get a link, something everyone understands, to a webpage, read in the ultimate universal client-a web browser. On app.net you just get mysterious silence. and "oh, that didn't work for you? huh..."

app.net is the linux of social media. Nerds love it but mortals will never get on board.

At that point wouldn't you be better off using a bigger social graph?

Yes - if you could get access to "a bigger social graph" without risking the owners of those bigger graphs shutting down or limiting your api keys, competing with you directly after you've proved/developed a market, or any of the other "dirty tricks" Twitter/FaceBook et al. have pulled on developers.

(Note: app.net might pull those dirty tricks in the future, but at least they've got a business model that doesn't _require_ them too)

Twitter only allows you access to 100k users or so (tokens), and your business is at risk of being turned off. or App.net providers you access to 150k+ users growing user base. Plus an a free sign up, access to hosting for file storage, and permissive messaging.

IMHO that is only true if you want to be a Twitter clone or otherwise be in the same business as Twitter.

Not if you want to leverage an already existing social graph, so that people have to sign up for one service less.

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