Announcing App.net Broadcast | Hacker News Reader

Announcing App.net Broadcast

blog.app.net

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Dalton Caldwell just showed me a new service that could be a very big deal.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/402260557325021184

Is this it?

It could be big. It certainly is something that I was missing on the web. Something that TV still does fairly well.

Translation: We have invested in App.net, directly, or by proxy

App.net was originally Mixed Media Labs, which made a product called PicPlz. They took over $7MM in funding. I _thought_ they got funded from YC, but can't find a reference to this now, so I must be mis-remembering.

http://www.crunchbase.com/product/picplz

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mixed-media-labs

They then shuttered their product to build App.net, doing the whole 'crowdsourcing' thing and collecting another $500,000. You know, which throws that whole "We won't shut down, you can build on our platform" thing into some amount of doubt.

Dalton is a part time partner at YC : http://daltoncaldwell.com/y-combinator

This must be what I was remembering, thank you!

If pg was talking about this, it feels like an over statement to me since it feels like it's the exact same idea as "close friends" on facebook, which creates a notification anytime one of them does something.

What am I missing?

The difference is the angle. The Facebook Close Friends is useful but is made for one to one relationships than organizations. App.net is not advising that you make an alert appear on your fans' phones everytime your band publishes anything on social media; they only want the band to use this feature when a new song is being released or they are about to perform in your area. It is publisher centric; Facebook Close Friends feature(which I love and use!) is consumer-focused. I don't think my Close Friends even know I get an alert each time they post something. In contrast I bet app.net plans to expose detailed analytics including engagement and unsubscription rates so publishers can further optimize content and reduce noise.

In that way, it sounds like a Facebook Page + Close Friends feature + letting publisher trigger notification on selective posts only.

The difference is that you already have Facebook installed and don't "need only to download the free App.net app for iOS or Android."

God damn it, shit fuck. I had been working this exact idea out in my head for several weeks, now the person who's opinion in tech has endorse that idea which is being created by a much bigger team. Should I just moved on, ?

Think of it as validation of your own idea, competition is always good.

I read the article, then read this tweet.. then searched Google for something else pg was referring to.. was disappointed when realized he was talking about the feature in the article :(

I wish Twitter supported this. It would be nice to have a mega-stream from NYT that dumped out tons of updates, but I could subscribe to threads of those updates. For instance I'd like to get "broadcasts" for their ongoing coverage of the current Senate filibuster news as well as non-breaking news, like their movie reviews, etc.

Essentially I'd like publishers to be able to categorize their tweets and make those categories available for subscription without having to create and follow discrete twitter accounts.

Sadly this is exactly the kind of thing of thing that could have been built on top of RSS, before everyone gave up on it.

For non-breaking news, sure. For breaking events, RSS is inappropriate. You need a push model (which ADN Broadcasts is), whereas RSS is the epitome of pull.

I still don't see the need for this. If my RSS reader is always polling for new messages then I will get the message. Push or pull, the end user doesn't see the difference.

You'd be hard-pressed to find an RSS reader that polls more often than every 5 minutes, and I would wager all of the RSS services have a longer refresh timer than that. If you're trying to keep up with breaking events, being 5+ minutes behind everyone else is pointless. You're just going to end up glued to Twitter.

If "always" means an interval of more than 10 seconds, true push is still going to feel a lot more high tech, even if it probably doesn't matter in practice for most (but not all) broadcasts.

Agreed. Nothing you couldn't do with RSS+pubsubhubbub. Perhaps it'll occupy a different area of thought-space and usage, even if it's technically equivalent.

Exactly! As if it is hard for media to understand that they can use twitter in a fashion that's not so maniac about tweeting for everything and anything.

This is pretty cool! Looks like I'll never miss a Perry Bible Fellowship again.

Low-frequency channels could utilize this.

A great percentage of the content I'm interested in is created or updated only rarely, and it tends to be superior to the kind of content that is churned out for quick consumption.

I fear that even with a tool like this, discovery, spam, and the need for heavy personal curation will still be problems. In any case, this stands to help improve signal:noise.

Ah App.Net- I forgot about that.

I still don't get App.net

I still don't get App.net, and this whole push notifications thing... isn't it like Twitter? or email?

Twitter became a medium to consume content for many people, and when it became mainstream, people started abusing it, and now you see tweets for everything, even unimportant stuff. If this takes off, I can see this happening too, people pushing unimportant marketing messages.

App.net still don't get me. Or anyone else.

> A good Broadcast Channel will send at most 1-2 Broadcasts per day

What about the bad channels. I'd love it if that 1-2 broadcasts was a hard limitation. I would be more inclined to subscribe to something I know was forced to pick the most interesting thing they had to say or at least to summarise.

I would like if I could set the limit (per-channel) on how many broadcasts I get. Publishers can try to send me as many broadcasts as they want, but if they go over my limit they're silenced until I choose to look at them explicitly.

I want broadcasters to (re)learn that breaking news is "Plane lands on Hudson river" not "dog bites man."

Channels have the average posting rate so you can pretty easily avoid subscribing to noisy channels.

rate limiting would increase it's usefulness

So I've had this idea before, but I thought it'd been done before...? Aren't there various services based on pubsubhubbub?

So it's as if @nytimes also had @nytimes_broadcast and you could subscribe to get push notifications for latter's tweets.

Anyone here remember zephyrgram instances back in the 90s?

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/doc/izephyr/html/node3...

I am only 25 so I didn't know about zephygram. How is it different to email or twitter?

(This is the only "valuable" page I found: http://the-tech.mit.edu/about/old/zwrite.html)

To me this is return of RSS post category feed which was popular enough but was eventually overshadowed by tags.

In Twitter terms, it's saved search with username and hashtag pair.

The real news here is that App.net finally has an Android app.

A couple friends and I are building something similar. The idea is great but more importantly is how you will bring this to mass market. If you had this idea before send me an email, we are looking for a fourth set of hands or just some insight.

FTA:

Just like an email list...

That was what I was thinking. Email is technically not push but there's not really a noticeable difference.

His Broadcast Twitter is richer and looks slicker but you have to sign up for another service and download an app to use it. I can't even browse what broadcasts are available. Why would anyone (who hasn't already drank the Kool-Aid) sign up?

Also this whole App.net thing is pretty weird. I thought it was intended for paid users only? Or did they find it hard to have a lucrative developer platform with no users?

sidenote: Snark and cynicism are the two hallmarks of shitty HN posts so I'm sorry. I feel like I'm in some alternate universe where people are building weird shiny things that nobody wants. Maybe this is a sign I'm getting old.

This is sounding a lot like Twitter without the social aspect.

Seems like an interesting concept. Don't know how the App.net integration works, but aside from that, it looks like an interesting idea.

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