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Comment by mantrax5 | Hacker News Reader

Remember rev="canonical"? It was to save us from the tyranny of bit.ly and co. Geeks rallied behind it.

Remember Open ID? It was to save us from the tyranny of Passport.NET and co. Geeks rallied behind it.

Remember Diaspora? It was to save us from the tyranny of Facebook. Geeks rallied behind it.

Remember App.net...?

The history of geeky "open" (or ad-free or whatever) alternatives to commercial social media services is littered with corpses. What geeks never learn is that social media services can't survive if the only appeal of the service is some righteous motivation that only they care about.

Sooner or later even geeks realize that using a "better" service to talk to nobody isn't very useful.

I know it seems easy to be Captain Obvious now that App.net is falling apart, but just you watch. Soon enough it'll happen again (and then again, and again).

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And before App.net, there was Identi.ca.

What is disappointing about App.net was that it had the potential to be a set of pipes and a broader infrastructure rather than being simply yet another social network. And that's what my true hope for App.net was.

Marketing is a huge part of the success of a new paradigm. App.net was "marketed" with a practically blank home page ("one login many applications" - which applications?), and a nondescript niche Twitter clone on one of its subdomains.

It had no chance at all. Where was the evangelism? Where were the presentations, demos, and the other useful apps built on this platform?

I'm a developer and I did hear about App.net when the buzz was at its peak. I remember going to their home page and wondering "wtf is this?", then checking alpha.app.net on a couple of occasions, finding nothing of interest and that's it.

That wonderful arrogance that the world will care about your project because you're somehow "right" has killed many tech efforts and will kill a lot to come yet.

This. So much of this.

I see real value in using App.net as an identity provider so that I'm not relying on something shaky like Twitter or Facebook but I can still get the benefits that come with an external provider (lower signup friction, 2-factor auth for users that want it, less overall damage if site is hacked). But (a) their marketing is so weird that I don't really know that I can do that, and (b) their onboarding for end users sucks, so I'm losing people telling them to sign up through them.

Those are really good points.

I think part of the problem was the initial strategy that required all accounts to be paid limited the userbase to the point that it wasn't worth experimenting with.

I don't know how you get around that challenge of building a mass userbase, keeping the framework open and yet still being sustainable. But that's a separate challenge from what you described.

Your other examples are good but OpenID is somewhat murky: the concept was good but the design was completely misconceived. The basic ID primitive should have been the email address instead of a URL — far fewer people have a stable homepage or think of its URL as representing their identity – and the entire system needed to be both simpler to implement and built around delegation to avoid requiring large companies to jump on board before anyone could adopt it.

That ship may have sailed – I think there's still hope – but I think there would have been a real chance for success had BrowserID shipped before everyone was pushed onto Google / Facebook / Twitter because those were the only options which didn't turn into a support disaster.

> Remember Diaspora? It was to save us from the tyranny of Facebook. Geeks rallied behind it.

No they didn't. Geeks resented Diaspora's funding and high profile and mocked its slow pace of development and initial security issues.

> What geeks never learn is that social media services can't survive if the only appeal of the service is some righteous motivation that only they care about.

Diaspora's somewhat overblown profile was a consequence of it being featured in the New York Times and its Kickstarter appeal being unexpectedly funded by thousands of ordinary (perhaps slightly naive) people.

openId is a spec, it didnt fail,Google and Yahoo are openid providers.

Measured by how often I do use Google to log into things, I'm not sure why the existence of providers is proof that it didn't fail. The login method that Google promotes doesn't seem to be openid but something that's easier to use (and only works with Google).

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