If the goal is to build a paid for blogging platform, it seems to me that App.net is doing all of the right things (or perhaps the goal is paid for live chat rooms, since they also seem able to support that). The infrastructure so far seems impressive, and Dalton has been transparent and highly communicative about much of what App.net is doing.
The only thing missing from all of this is for someone like Dalton to actually say "We are building a paid blogging platform." When App.net was initially described, it sounded like "This will be just like Twitter, but you will pay for it." And that never made sense.
It seems to me they now have the infrastructure to support several business models that people might actually pay for (blogs, private chat rooms, etc) but if anyone at App.net has said what the intended business model is, then I missed the announcement.
The Twitter thing was kind of a misunderstanding. App.net, as far as I understood it, wants to be a paid platform for a variety of applications. Just that they won't show ads, and they won't remove features, cripple features, or limit the API in order to serve advertising or monetary interests.
They're trying to implement something where you sign up once, as a user, and you can use multiple apps on top of it, and in all these apps you'll have the same data (your friends, messages, etc), yet unlike facebook, they're not blocking apps or limiting the API or putting adds in your news stream, or deliberately removing friends' posts from your news stream so that others have to pay in order to appear in your stream again.
"The Twitter thing was kind of a misunderstanding"
Didn't Dalton market App.net as a response to Twitter rate limits and taking away features?
By making a paid API, he's essentially moving in the right step. But there's 1 problem: his system will never have the data that a network like Twitter or FB has. What good is a paid search API when I'll only get 10 "tweets" a min?
Twitter was the prime example of an API that was good, and had promised to become even better, and then - due to internal pivot towards more marketing and advertising - became crippled. What Dalton tried to say was, create a platform that could be everything, and it'll never become crippled.
Also, this idea stems from a time, a couple of years ago, where some people used to consider twitter a sort of data platform and not a social media platform. The fantastic api allowed people to hack together gadgets that used the twitter api to communicate with other gadgets, people used it as an api channel for real time chess games, etc. That's what Twitter, the platform, was in the eyes of many people. While Twitter nowadays sees itself as something entirely different.
In the platform-kind-of-way, the tweets are not imporant, they're only one example of what could be done on top of the API.
App.net is/was DOA. Dalton managed to con(vince) a bunch of developers to fork over money, but really, nobody cares what happens to App.net because the platform is proprietary and not open-source.
So open-standards don't matter? While they haven't given their source for their backend, they've been pretty open about how it's built, plus they've open sourced several pieces of their platform (Omega, Pourover, Ohe).
App.net is for the general consumer that's not going to be able to run their own server stack. If you can run your own server stack, you can use all these open standards outlined in this blog posts to consume the data and do what you like.
Well for new applications, at the start I can access a market of 100k (tokens) from Twitter or I can acccess a market of 140k+ and growing from App.net. I think a lot of developers/businesses will do the math.
One could also argue that less data means less noise and more signal. Also the data on app.net is more structured (see their annotation implementation).
Can someone clarify this for me. It seems like they are openly publishing to a number of formats, which presumably(?) don't require an app.net account to access. Does this mean that they are defacto turning it in to a pay to publish (rather than pay to subscribe) platform?
I would say no. Free accounts are limited to following 40 accounts but are unlimited in followers. Which means publishers don't have to pay anything to have a large following. But a subscriber may have to pay if they wish to consume a lot of the content.
But if they are publishing each user's feed to RSS, then you don't need an app.net account to subscribe to more than 40 users. Or am I missing something?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadThe only thing missing from all of this is for someone like Dalton to actually say "We are building a paid blogging platform." When App.net was initially described, it sounded like "This will be just like Twitter, but you will pay for it." And that never made sense.
It seems to me they now have the infrastructure to support several business models that people might actually pay for (blogs, private chat rooms, etc) but if anyone at App.net has said what the intended business model is, then I missed the announcement.
They're trying to implement something where you sign up once, as a user, and you can use multiple apps on top of it, and in all these apps you'll have the same data (your friends, messages, etc), yet unlike facebook, they're not blocking apps or limiting the API or putting adds in your news stream, or deliberately removing friends' posts from your news stream so that others have to pay in order to appear in your stream again.
Didn't Dalton market App.net as a response to Twitter rate limits and taking away features?
By making a paid API, he's essentially moving in the right step. But there's 1 problem: his system will never have the data that a network like Twitter or FB has. What good is a paid search API when I'll only get 10 "tweets" a min?
Also, this idea stems from a time, a couple of years ago, where some people used to consider twitter a sort of data platform and not a social media platform. The fantastic api allowed people to hack together gadgets that used the twitter api to communicate with other gadgets, people used it as an api channel for real time chess games, etc. That's what Twitter, the platform, was in the eyes of many people. While Twitter nowadays sees itself as something entirely different. In the platform-kind-of-way, the tweets are not imporant, they're only one example of what could be done on top of the API.
App.net is for the general consumer that's not going to be able to run their own server stack. If you can run your own server stack, you can use all these open standards outlined in this blog posts to consume the data and do what you like.
There's even a http://dev-lite.jonathonduerig.com/ so you don't need to pay anything to tinker with their API.
One could also argue that less data means less noise and more signal. Also the data on app.net is more structured (see their annotation implementation).