If you took Facebook and Twitter making a few people mad lately out of the equation, this is a mediocre idea at best. I think its feeding off of people's temporary anger at the situation. I think it will pass.
The economics behind the app.net idea are way beyond mediocre. Charging users for a platform capable of hosting a wide range of apps and compensating developers with revenue share based on usage aligns everyone's interests with the users. The platform provides the best infrastructure and the app developers are incentivised to create lasting value for users, since they keep getting paid for as long as people keep using their apps.
Besides, if it's such a mediocre idea why are some of the smartest folks in tech backing it already? Check out the gallery of community members on the signup page.
Some of the smartest people in tech have supported a ton of failures. Every VC on the planet has a long list of "the next big thing" that never went anywhere. I don't necessarily care if some of the "smartest" people in tech are backing it. App.net has raised under $300,000 -- if it was THAT awesome, they would have raised the full $500K almost instantly. Fred Wilson would have just just wrote a check for the whole thing. They might like the idea, but if there was a viable business model there would have been a frenzy if the proposed product was that awesome. I still can't understand how this is supposed to make money. And giving someone a $50 or $100 or $1000 pledge on Kickstarter is pocket change for tech luminaries. They're likely supporting the founders more than a specific implementation. I don't know many people actually salivating over this or else they wouldn't be needing Kickstarter.
More power to the founders, I'm just skeptical because it still isn't clear what this project is supposed to accomplish. It's almost like Occupy got involved in a software project to vent anger over the big companies acting in ways with which they disagree.
Still, good luck to the App.net team. I hope they succeed and I'm proven to be an ignorant Luddite!
Sure there's an anger component, but that's a low blow to call it Occupy. First of all, it's not an aimless protest at a "big company", it's anger about the fact that Twitter became a big company on the backs of these developers, but when it comes to monetize, turning into an ad company and shutting any threat to the ad revenue stream down is always the safe bet.
More importantly, it's not just a bunch of ideologues camped out on a lawn smoking weed. Dalton is making an assertion that the only way to make the service that the Twitter developers of 2006, 2007, 2008 signed up for, is to enshrine it in founding principles. This is because inevitably advertisers always outbid users.
Because of this, of course VCs aren't going to pony up the $500k. There's not that much upside for a VC. But that doesn't mean the service doesn't have value, it just means that value can't be captured the same way a billion-user free service can. However, the promise of stability means that for developers it is much less risky to build against, and they can create much more value. Some of that value maybe captured, some of it not, but just because no one is making a buck doesn't mean there isn't a tremendous amount of value being created.
Finally, the Kickstarter thing is critical to this project because it validates the idea itself. If a VC writes a check that proves nothing, but if 10,000 users promise $50 that is a critical mass right there. It's sort of like how public radio members drive the big contributions. No one is going to pay $50 for an empty social network, but if there are 10,000 quality people there you know there will be at least something interesting on day one.
>> it's anger about the fact that Twitter became a big company on the backs of these developers,
No, I disagree on this. This is not true. Remember, the developers wouldn't even care about developing for this platform if it wasn't big in the first place. Developers didn't make it big. Twitter became big, and developers came flocking in.
It would be mediocre if it was simply an "open api" twitter/facebook but, given the chatter on the Alpha site and the look of the API on git (https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec), I think there is something bigger going on here.
Its a cool api, and I mean no disrespect to anybody involved like the guy said above, I just believe the business as a whole is a kneejerk reaction to a couple of well connected people and sites getting the rug pulled out from under them. It would be cool if they could get enough people to use it, but the API is only useful if there is useful data to pull from it.
It's not exactly a knee-jerk reaction to an isolated incident though. Twitter has been moving in the media company direction for a while now, and with the latest communications you can almost see the "fuck you developers" oozing out from between every line of shmarmy corporate-speak.
Any developer would be a fool now to build a product whose core relies on Twitter's API. And yet the core functionality of Twitter is an incredibly useful base to build on.
With App.net you don't have the volume of Twitter, but on the other hand you will presumably have a much higher signal to noise ratio. It won't be inundated with marketing spam, bot follows, and banal teen banter. And in any case, Twitter was small once too, and people found a use for it. I think a critical mass of 10,000 is definitely enough to enable some interesting apps.
