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Comment by opendais | Hacker News Reader

I think it really boiled down to the fact the market for "paid Twitter" was too small to support the kind of network effects required to create an entire ecosystem.

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I have never heard even one compelling argument for why paying for app.net makes sense.

I pay money and...? I honestly have no idea.

I pay money and... they don't keep trying to stuff monetizing junk all up in my twitter feed.

Everything you want to know about App.net is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Caldwell

It's an interesting project!

For an "interesting project", the home-page communicates zero information: https://app.net/

So many words and yet I really have a hard time grasping why I'd ever want to use this thing.

If Wikipedia does a better job explaining the service than the service's own site it's in trouble. If there was no competition maybe, but there is, and everyone knows about it.

You pay money, Dalton becomes a partner at YC.

Everybody wins!

Oh. Wait.

Wasn't the twitter-wannabe just one of a number of applications on their platform?

It was the initial use case, and it was the use case that App.net crowd funded $500k for.

First impressions mean a lot.

It's very true, but they:

1. never really made it clear 2. never explained what else that framework was good for 3. never grew out of being a Twitter clone.

It was the primary application at the start and without a large enough userbase, no other applications ever achieved significant adoption.

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