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Subscribe to Y Combinator’s Broadcasts via App.net

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25 pointskatm20 comments

"Two weeks ago App.net launched Broadcasts, a tool that lets you send and receive important messages via push notification....Broadcasts slice through noisy social feeds and cluttered inboxes, and are only delivered to users who explicitly subscribe to the channel."

This looks like an ongoing treadmill of "these older media are too cluttered and noisy to get through so here's a new, more obnoxious medium that cuts through the noise (but only because not everyone has started using it yet)". Anecdotally, I'm the only person I know who turns off almost all my push notifications and everyone else's phone I've seen is already cluttered with them so Broadcast might be too late.

I'm with you re: push notifications. They are off for every app except a few, which magnifies their impact when they do come through (for me, this is the point).

Generally, the stated description of Broadcasts reminds me of Twitter: subscribe to what you want. I suppose I could see room for innovation around programmatic selection of what I might actually want to get push notifications about.

There are very few notifications that I want pushed to me. Probably nothing from YC, that's what Twitter does for me (unless I was in the YC program). I might be missing something here or I might not be in the target for 'broadcasts'. If you 'get' this then please let me know as I'm genuinely curious what the use case is.

The more push notifications I receive the less I notice the important ones like when my wife sends me an SMS that she's going to sell our kids on Craigslist.

I like the idea of App.net's 'broadcasts'... but why not let the subscriber/follower promote any particular stream to 'broadcast' level?

(The implicit contract – "this stream won't be so noisy you'll regret its interruptions" – could be communicated and negotiated via other mechanisms. Or via a hinting field – "this stream best for broadcast" – that individual followers could choose to respect or ignore.)

Wait, App.net is free?

The free tier's existed for months but has had wonky requirements at times (like only being able to get to it via a third-party app), and they continue to communicate really poorly about it.

It doesn't require a 3rd party app at all. For an invite an 3rd party app will give a bonus to the person that invited you.

http://blog.app.net/2013/02/25/introducing-a-free-tier/

"To receive Broadcasts, a subscriber needs only to download the free App.net app for iOS or Android."

Is this just RSS to Push then? As a subscriber, or even as another tool/service, I'd like to have other options to receive broadcasts, like email, a RSS reader, etc. Push seems like a very limited channel for reusability.

This is app.net to Push. There are several was to get data on app.net and as well out of App.net. Mainly via 3rd party software and their open source PourOver app.

I've written an IRC and IMAP bridge to get data off app.net personally.

Wasn't App.Net a pay-only social network before? What happened to that? Is this new model a pivot?

Earlier this year they added a free tier.

http://blog.app.net/2013/02/25/introducing-a-free-tier/

About a few months ago, App.net decided that being a Twitter clone won't work, so it is trying to be a data framework that anyone can use. (Which incidentally Dropbox is also trying to do.)

That was always the core of their model. The idea was to monetize a Twitter-ish network by monetizing app development and API usage, a model which was allegedly on the table at Twitter itself at one point. They've just communicated really poorly about the whole thing.

Isn't DropBox's data api more granular (record-level). Where App.net is more coarse (file-level) and not really ideal for changing data. In fact App.net only has one primitive that you can edit and it can only store up to 8k of data.

It was actually part of their original plan (See the beginning of http://blog.app.net/2013/02/25/introducing-a-free-tier/)

First they charged and crowd-sourced for marketing and proving their concept. Paying early adopters allowed them to pay developers which attracted the developers who made apps. Then they had the apps and content to attract the users, so they made it free.

I believe they embraced of open standards like RSS and WebFinger (http://blog.app.net/2013/08/07/response-to-brennan-novak-par...) to make sure developers would choose them for implementation.

I think App.net maybe trying to become the identity platform for the web (maybe not the only one but a damn good alternative to the rest).

As a developer given the choice between Twitter's 100k token limit or App.net's almost 200k users (plus a chance to get paid by app.net) it's a no brainer.

I think their main competitor now is Facebook Connect. And there are plenty of users out there that are refusing to use FB.

How can they afford the SMS costs? One broadcast -- thousands of messages.

Receiver pays in the US.

Wait what? But to send to a phone, you need to pay twilio 1c or something. How do you actually SEND the sms for free? Can you describe it? I have NEVER heard of a free way to send sms except though sms gateways, and the result in that case is ugly.

These are push notifications – not SMS

Aha that makes more sense. Push notifications are free on all platforms.

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