This is a whole new era, either way. Congrats to the App.net team!
Every cent well deserved. I was a supporter, and I look forward to helping build app.net in to something amazing.
What this means for the future: Companies will announce croudfunding and then fake amazing numbers in order to appear popular and gain lots of press.
I can see the headline now: "ACME Software raises $3 million in first 24 hours!" Actual funds raised: $250.
It's very similar to Louis C.K.'s online video. While his video was successful, it only worked because he'd already established a name for himself. Other, lesser known, comedians will have a hard time replicating that because they don't have the brand already.
If first-time entrepreneurs try and use crowd-funding, I just don't see catching unless the product is truly awesome (think Pebble).
For example, see this: https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/234698066245074945 and https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/234399350275571714
EDIT: Added a link to Twitter conversation showing more context.
"We are using Stripe, so it's easy to audit." - Dalton Caldwell
Actually, that's an interesting question: would it be fraud to fake the last $xxx,xxx of a crowd sourcing drive?
But the real question is how they got funded more than 50% in just 4 days? It's amazing. I hope this is not a manual increase of the counter.
I could see a similar model of aligning user/company interests rather than advertiser/company interests working for other services--email probably being the biggest that comes to mind.
This is actually a good thing for revenue as even a small membership fee is going to VASTLY outweigh the per user revenue generated from advertising. We'll see if this idea is capable of jumping from internet nerdom to the mainstream, but mainstream users are also becoming more and more aware of the actual cost of 'free' products.
So... congrats app.net team, and good luck!
Thanks.
That and the press blitz, of course.
What really needs to happen is an open decentralized protocol needs to be agreed upon for newsfeeds + blog posts (wordpress) + microblog (twitter). Then everyone can write their own servers and clients and operate in a manner like Email currently works.
It's a twitter alternative that will (hopefully) not treat users as product.
It's also being thought about as a more open developer friendly platform (eg no constraints on clients because the service needs to show adverts).
Well, maybe. Let's remember that Twitter has more than a hundred million accounts, while App.net has ~7500; we have no evidence that the people feeling that are not just a small number of outliers, much like there always will be.
Honestly I haven't thought he would manage to raise this amount.
I just checked at on 8 and it was 43%. After that I didn't look into the count. Now, wow I'm impressed. I think this is the best crowdfunding effort I've ever seen.
I'm not a backer of app.net. But would love to hear about the roadmap and future development. Still twitter, FB is OK for me. I'm waiting for what app.net can offer something I wanted.
BTW I'm not a hater :)
Good Luck! App.net team.
Then do it. Make everyone look like idiots for not doing it sooner. Make it so cool I have to sign up.
Seriously though, this is great. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next. Hoping to experiment on the journalism front there.
Now I can see a problem arising if they take outside investment.
2. Curious to see all the post-funding pile-on. Looks like their subscribers are jumping quite quickly (for a Sunday!) now that funding has been met. Funding validation makes it feel like a safer 'bet' now?
3. Really curious to see if app.net can scale better than Twitter from the start. I'm talking full archives, proper search, robust conversation tracking. If app.net covers these areas sufficiently well, I could see this becoming a go-to feed for journalists / other people for whom proper archives and full-search would be invaluable.
You answered your own question above, and also identified why app.net won't interest you. If you're okay with ads, then I think you'd get zero utility from app.net
Brilliant.
Are ads in and of themselves really a huge problem? I don't find myself often annoyed by them. Now if there were a systemic change to the service because you didn't have to alter the experience for users to generate ad revenue, then I begin to understand. However if this is the idea, then in what ways the service would be different is exactly what I'm trying to figure out.
Remember, there are two sides to the coin "we offer a better experience without the ads" method. First of all you are going to get a smaller user base. So how much are you going to charge? $5/month? $10/month? You would need to get a pretty massive user base to be able to pay the overhead and attract top engineering talent, so in the end I'm not sure you'd be a whole lot better off.
I agree. I'm not in the business of predicting the future, but it's worth noting that Twitter did not start with more than a hundred million accounts.
A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe when a company focuses on them as a customer rather than them as eyeballs to be sold to advertisers, who are the customer, then a better service is the outcome for the users of the service.
With app.net the user is the customer. With Facebook and Twitter, the user is the product. With App.Net user interests and service provider interests are aligned. The provider wants the service to be better for the users.
With Facebook and Twitter and other ad supported products the users who value their privacy have intentions which are constantly at odds with the service provider whose intention is to continually open up details about the individuals so that those details can be used to improve ad success rates and profitability.
As a developer, I'm a lot more excited about it. I backed mainly because I was so excited about an API that could've been what Twitter promised. I'm especially excited to see what annotations is going to emerge through it. To explain it in short: Any app can now embed any information in a post. This is big. To give a small example: Say people who allow IFTTT to post their music to app.net. IFTTT can decided to add meta information to it (adding song titles, artists, etc). Now anyone else can easily extract this information.
There is a whole underlying network waiting to be discovered. Anything can now live within in it. What if you wanted to do an instagram type app? Ask users with app.net accounts to log in. When they post a photo, add your own information to it (photo title, photo url, etc).
In the normal app.net (alpha) interface, you won't miss anything. You'll just see someone posting a photo. However, now this new instagram type app can extract this information from a user's feed, using app.net's infrastructure as their social backbone! Any social service can live on app.net's infrastructure now.
At facebook, they have engineers devoted to pleasing users, and others devoted to pleasing advertisers. It's a difficult line to walk, but it's a legitimate argument that advertisers may win in the end because Facebook is now a public company and must show positive earnings growth and all that.
App.net (I think) is proposing that if that line does not exist, they can focus 100% on building a product that users will love using, rather than something that strikes a balance between pleasing users and advertisers. I could see this being a better product in general.
All your concerns are valid though. I'm not on facebook myself, so this service itself has absolutely no appeal to me--however, I do think there are some good points behind the premise, and I've heard through the grapevine that a lot of people do use facebook pretty frequently.
So congrats, Dalton, can't wait to see what happens next!
Not sure why the down vote. I'm not associated to the project. Just to highlight an effort of a decentralised social platform.
Now it is up to the developers to show us!!
So, what explicit rights does the customer have over that which they get with Facebook or Twitter? Do I have voting rights for features? Is the business model solid? I mean, $500,000 is great and all, but that needs to last an entire year all while supporting future development. Sure, they can get new people on board, but what's their plan for that?
As for being the customer, it means little. As we've learned from experience, being a customer doesn't mean anything. You ask a question about being the product or being the customer as if being a customer actually gives you something, when in reality, it doesn't. I mean, in this case, you get a years worth of service. After that, nothing else is promised.
So, beyond the years worth of service, what do you really get? What are they promising? Because so far from what I see, the reality differs from the promise.
IMO, the people who care about ads on social networking have Adblock+ installed. I would even go so far as to throw this (very probably unsourcable statement) and say that most users don't care about ads, period. The one thing that pulls me to social networking is people, not the ads. A social network isn't social or a network if there aren't people I know or care about using it.
Why is it called App.net?
The first 4 or 5 articles I saw about it, I ignored completely because I assumed it was some sort of app (web/mobile/whatever) framework, not a social network. They talk about the users being the customers (versus advertisers), but the name of the service is clearly targeting developers, not the users...
As a developer, I never thought once about building an app or integration for Diaspora.
That's why App.Net might have a chance -- he's making this about targeting developers. There's a reason Apple has spent millions marketing different 3rd party apps -- and the whole ecosystem via "there's an app for that". There's a reason "killer app" is part of our lexicon. There's a reason Steve Ballmer jumped around on stage screaming 'Developers!' and there's a reason XCode is free now.
Building it is not a guarantee that they will come. But it is a prerequisite.
If even Google is having trouble getting traction with a social networking product, I don't see why anyone is confident that a social network users have to pay for will end up with a large enough user base to be useful.
Currently, I'm okay in paying $50 to get access to a great community of early adopters (lets admit, it is mostly tech people). I'm not naive to expect it won't change, but once killer apps start popping up on the ecosystem, more users will join which will bring back the value that the older social networks provided.
Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?
Where's the evidence that suggests millions of people have to join?
> Well, maybe. Let's remember that Twitter has more than a hundred million accounts, while App.net has ~7500; we have no evidence that the people feeling that are not just a small number of outliers, much like there always will be.
It seems to me that the vast majority of people do not care and will just use whatever everyone else is using. If open-source, federated alternatives such as Identica do not have many users, then I don't understand how App.net can hope to get enough to matter.
Personally, I use Twitter mostly to talk to people in the fields I work in, namely hacking and journalism. I don't see how either of those communities will move to App.net wholesale. If you want me to pay money just to have a conversation with you, I'm probably going to decide to just not have the conversation.
Ads on Facebook and Twitter don't bother me. I won't be paying to get rid of them. I don't even use AdBlock to get rid of them for free (partially because I think it's unethical to do).
I don't think Twitter has any other choice because they chose the free path from the start. I highly doubt Twitter would suddenly switch to a premium/freemium model.
While Twitter has empowered revolutions, I think the quality of the community has degraded though.
I believe that if people pay for being part of a community, people would care to improve its quality. If something is free, people just won't take care of it.
My first post on Twitter was "trying to figure out WTF Twitter is". I subsequently didn't post for six months. I wouldn't judge the platform on what's posted in the first 30 days of existence. As for sustainability, $500k in revenue is more than Twitter had for years.
The highest paying ads will surface to the top over the highest quality status updates.
I use facebook and twitter to be heard by my friends. I don't need a massive audience to get utility from the service. Brands and celebrities are the ones that want to be heard by tons of people. Twitter and Facebook are just a different type of ad platforms for them.
If my friends are on app.net, I will use it. Most people I know wouldn't pay for it though. Perhaps app.net would be good to allow power users to sponsor their friends.
Yes. But I have no interest in talking to +90% of the people on Twitter and Facebook. The success of app.net won't depend on how many total users sign up over the services lifetime. It will depend more on how interesting the people who ultimately sign up are. A lot of it is perception, right now twitter is something of a worldwide telegraph broadcast service, you say something in 140 characters to as many people as humanly possible. You're trying to garner as many likes and followers as you can.
App.net can't compete as a broadcast service, they don't; and never will have the userbase to do so. I feel like they'll have to differentiate themselves in some other way to be successful.
If the conversations end up anything near as inane as twitter it's doomed.
Are there really that many developers clamoring to build new apps on yet another closed, for-profit, centralized social network with no users? I sure don't. I'm already done with Twitter and Facebook apps, the centralized model is simply not the way forward and I can't be alone with this opinion.
Techcrunch posted an editorial a while back that I agree with:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/03/the-federated-web-should-be...
In the end, people will pay for app.net for quality and for access: ala HBO, satellite radio, etc.
This is the crux of the matter. I don't see how enough of my friends will ever be on App.net for me to pay for it, especially when I already use free products that have the same functionality.
I don't know if it'll work, but I certainly hope it does.
I imagine it being pretty spam-free if it costs $50/year, as a bonus.
1. Platform. Its not about 1 canonical interface or usage. Its real time social information network plumbing. Build your own idea on top of it. In the beginning it will be twitter clones, eventually it will be hooked into all sorts of information generators and consumers in different contexts.
2. Its about incentives. The incentives are for app.net to build the apis to support things twitter of fb never would, due an incentive to drive innovation, not stifle it.
3. Its about users control and choice. Use the interface or apps you want. Control where your information goes and who is mining it.
4. Its about friction. There is friction to blatant abuse via a pay model and there is a lack of friction to develop frictionless sharing with things like instagram.
5. Its about ownership. Your data is yours unless you choose to give it away to others.
6. Its also about alternatives to a single model for success (winner take all ad based strategies). I think its a mistake to think that its only successful with huge network effects. The infrastructure can service uses and apps that export information to other networks as well as in network uses. Its successful if it has paying users that pay for opex and capex and generate some profit.
The counter to this is that its difficult to explain to grandma in omaha until the new apps and usage models get built. If its just a paid twitter, it will fail in its ambitions. If it leads to safe private frictionless sharing in ways that couldnt realistically be contemplated before, its a success. The alpha proof of concept that is in place now is twitterish, no denying, but people are already working on things that just arent possible with facebook and twitter today.
Congrats to Dalton and all involved. This is one of the most interesting and courageous internet projects in recent time.
Twitter and Facebook wants to market to their users. This now influences all of their product decisions! Any changes to the service aim to increase CPM. I won't debate whether that makes FB/Twitter better or worse, but they are fundamentally different than a product which does not seek, above all else, to raise money by advertising to its users.
Here are some ways in which a paid service might differ from an ad-based service:
(1) No ads means no B2B sales team, which means more money to hire developers.
(2) The product pipeline looks different without ads. Would Twitter have featured "Explore" so prominently if it wasn't a central hub for advertising? Would they have de-emphasized direct messages?
(3) Lower infrastructure costs and dev time related to scaling. A smaller user base, in this case, will require less supporting infrastructure and a simpler code base. Both of these save app.net money and dev time, allowing the team to focus on features.
(4) Analytics and research will have a different purpose. Instead of analyzing user behavior to identify ideal ad placement or selection, App.net will try to identify the best features and cull the worst in an attempt to keep users around.
I don't see how this is true. If my friends aren't on App.net, I'll still use Facebook. If the people who discuss the issues that I tend to tweet about aren't on App.net, I'll still use Twitter. What will I then gain by using App.net as well, especially since most App.net users will probably syndicate their posts to Twitter?
That said, I wish Caldwell the best of luck. In the future hopefully he can provide tiered pricing plans.
Maybe App.net will nicely take care of that. I would definitely like to see a social network that provides me with content I want for once. Google+ has come pretty close, but that'll rapidly change if it gains mainstream traction, although Circles could prove to be a solution.
They're now trying to freeze innovation and homogenise us. That's the real killer, not the ads (although the ads are shit too).
Sure, it'll be ok for many people in the future. But it probably won't be the Twitter that I and others want. What's wrong with trying an alternative?
Why does Hacker News exist? And other special interest web forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists? Who do interest groups hold meetups? People with shared interests get MASSIVE value from highly focused gatherings and conversations. And Twitter right now is anything but focused.
I unfollow people on Twitter when I don't care to see what they're posting. Most people don't use the tools that notify users when people unfollow them, so it's not a big deal. Even for the ones that notice, I just don't care. I don't use Twitter for friends; I use it for interests. If you're not posting about my interests with an acceptable signal to noise ratio, you're unfollowed.
Using App.net to filter out people you don't want to hear from won't work unless you think the value of ones posts correlates with their propensity to pay. I doubt that's the case, and you're definitely going to filter out plenty of worthwhile content that people post on Twitter.
It seems to me that people want App.net to succeed regardless of the likelihood that it will solve their problems. This is a good position for App.net to be in, but I don't understand it.
For what it's worth, when I joined Twitter it was also a tech ghetto. Kevin Rose, Leo Laporte, Guy Kawasaki, and Veronica Belmont were all in the top 10 most followed accounts.
Sure, well, lets all hope that app.net will not run out of subscription fees. My take is that in a situation where IF this gets more popular and costs to sustain its life-pulse will grow, its plausible Dalton will have to choose between #1 shutting it down if not enough money flows in (and piss off all who still want to contribute and don't care that others won't pay), or #2 find a different way of bringing the money in. Let's hope its nor advertising.
> If something is free, people just won't take care of it.
Sure, that's why the Hackers News group is built upon 99% bots and is constantly filled in with spammers and haters. That's why every day you have high quality content uploaded to YouTube, for free to watch.
People don't care whether something is free or not; people care whether that something brings them any value, then they look at the price, whether they can afford it or not.
Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50?
Ultimately, its up to Dalton and his executive skills (is he going to be the CEO?) to build a company's structure and split the fee the smart way (have a decent anti-spam team) to keep the site fun and clean [of spam].
* Having a slightly nicer experience
or
* Having all their friends and potential friends on the same service
For a social service, door number 2 (positive network externalities) would be my guess.
The reality is there's always going to be pressures from different directions, there's nothing special about app.net in that regard.
I wish them well, but I don't expect to be paying for access any time soon.
(Such a thing might be difficult anyway - my casual reading suggests that anything beyond the most basic one-way bridge would be a Twitter TOS violation:
https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms
1. All use of the Twitter API and content, [emphasis mine - ed.] documentation, code, and related materials made available to you on or through Twitter ("Twitter Content") is subject to and must comply with these Rules
5A. Your Client must use the Twitter API as the sole source for features that are substantially similar to functionality offered by Twitter. Some examples include trending topics, who to follow, and suggested user lists.
5E. You may not use Twitter Content or other data collected from end users of your Client to create or maintain a separate status update or social network database or service.
6. You do not have a license to Twitter Content submitted through your Service other than the rights granted in the Rules.
What a legal minefield. So it's probably a good idea to have an obvious guardrail to prevent people from straying too close to the minefield, and this 256-character limit is a cute way to implement the guardrail.)
Twitter is NOT going to compromise the integrity of the entire site for ads. Google haven't. Facebook haven't. Microsoft haven't. And thousands of other sites haven't.
Now I'm sure having to cater to the advertisers certainly affects the decision making(even a bit adversely at times), however their massive following is essentially what makes them valuable.
I also notice that whenever this idea is challenged, I only see people simply parroting his belabored battle-cry of "catering to the users" without actually giving any concrete examples. I'm not against app.net's idea, I just believe the true novelty of this project is creating a micro-twitter(which can also be created on twitter by simply following certain people) for affluent tech people, and _keeping_ it that way via the subscription fee.
Besides that, I haven't read or heard of anything that they plan to do fundamentally different than twitter. Honestly, even if they do, and it actually proves to be a great feature that users love, I don't see why twitter can't simply copy it and perhaps even make it better.
> You will be committing to pre-paying a full year of "member" tier service.
True, that alone might not do it. The $50 paired with a rudimentary reporting system might limit the use of a single account to a small time period in which the ROI wouldn't be worth it.
It's an interesting alternate perspective that has somehow gained the force of common wisdom without the evidence to support it. On a service like Twitter, the users are both customer and product, as five minutes of objectively clear thought would show.
App.Net make succeed or it may fail, but it won't be because of this issue.
1) self moderation: Google Plus has circles which you can theoretically use to share specific topics only with circles that you know to be passionate about them. Requires manual work to setup the right circles and people rarely do it.
2) manual moderation: Hacker News uses pg's time and some admin/moderator supervision to trim unwanted topics. Requires manual work which expands proportionally with the community's size if no automation is used.
3) automatic moderation: HN's flag system and community moderation (voting, Slashdot karma) seem to work relatively well, but they've been used until now predominantly to "rank" good comments to the top as opposed to "clustering" online communities into "sub-reddits" with focused interest groups.
We are using Stripe to host/power the billing aspects of join.app.net. In the very near
future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all
privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest
manner.
That said, there's already a working Twitter-like distributed network. I hard my own StatusNet node running on my personal server and getting messages from people on Identi.ca, until I realized that I found the idea of the platform interesting, but not the platform itself (nor Twitter, for that matter). The fact that half the accounts were abandoned didn't help either.
If the quality is degrading it's because of YOUR friends and YOUR choices about who to follow. Other people including myself simply hide posts or unfollow when the SNR becomes too low.
What puzzles me is that the HN crowd seems to be the target audience for whatever it is App.net wants to do but Dalton & friends totally failed to get them interested enough even after so much posts here.
With Gruber they reached a different crowd and got the money, which may prove that they have something interesting on their hands but now they'll have do deal with different expectations from their users, and I'm highly skeptical it will make their strategy clearer.
I hate adverts, but I think app.net is unlikely to topple FB or Twitter in the social sector.
Myspace is a warning to Twitter and FB, if you don't look after your users, improve your service and keep them happy then you the advertisers will leave too.
Sure the advertisers are a force that doesn't necessarily align with the users, but this is something the people running the network have to mitigate, because it isn't in their intrests to piss off their users.
That being said, I think advertising is in a bubble, so from that perspective app.net has an advantage.
@christopher: I think there's value in some kind of tiered pricing model, especially when it comes to enabling students - in a managed, not free for all, manner - to contribute positively to the ecosystem. Perhaps that's the educator in me.
@elliottpayne: I think there's a broader issue of elitism & the digital divide baked into @adn, but that's a bit out of scope of this topic. But it's a weird suggestion that students can't add value
This is a thread from the site, but I'm quoting it here because it's relevant to the discussion about what kind of community app.net will become. The first two comments make me uneasy: even if there is value in excluding/discouraging people who don't contribute positively-- which is true for a site like Hacker News, but not so much, I think, for a Twitter-like site where you only see the activity of people you follow; the Global stream is an exception, but it'll only take a little more growth before it becomes unusable anyway-- trying to judge from a blank slate whether someone who might sign up for the site is likely to contribute value, especially based on such vague metrics as "ability to pay $50" and "student", runs the risk of being elitism for the sake of elitism. For some, $50 is enough of a barrier that they'll only sign up if they're especially interested (a sign that they'll contribute value); for others, it's little more than an impulse purchase. As for students, I agree that the site should avoid favoring students over people who don't go to college, but as a rather biased student (and backer), I contest the sentiment that students can't contribute value or need to be "managed" more than your average slightly older entrepreneur. ;p Even though age probably weakly correlates with quality, the goal of the site should not be to slightly increase average quality, but, if anything, to ensure that the highest quality users, the right edge of the bell curve, are there, which exclusionary principles will discourage.
Of course, the $50 is not actually some kind of proof of relevance but actual funding for the operation of the site; it can't be avoided. But I think it should mostly be considered a necessary evil, and there should be a focus on letting people who are unwilling to pay it but are strongly interested in the community get in anyway, such as with a sponsorship system.
> "there's a reason XCode is free now"
...I think anyone who has used XCode 4 for any substantial project would probably say the reason XCode is free is because charging for it would be adding insult to injury.
(The point is: it's not easy to audit. Not that I actually care one way or the other.)
It's like lower Manhattan or parts of San Francisco. People who think the rents are ridiculous shouldn't live there anyway; it's not for them.
Sounds wrong, doesn't it? The circles sharing model is backwards-- why should I have to make guesses about what other people are interested about?
I've written about this on a previous App.net HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304061, core excerpt = "I want to subscribe to that person on a "coding" stream, and leave the "personal" stream alone. People are multi-dimensional beings with many orthogonal interests; Consider giving them multiple stdouts.") and App.net PM said it was duly noted. I.e. it will be ignored, and the site is destined to be a noisy mess just like everything else that currently exists, except it will also cost money.
It is a good idea, although I don't see myself using it.
StatusNet actually sounds kinda good. Why isn't it more popular? I'm not sure, perhaps people need something more than just a replacement for Twitter. I think something that will eventually become successful will be some sort of multi-use low-level protocol that handles many types of "social communications", for example: Twitter + WordPress + Private IM + Voice Message.
Note: There's nothing wrong with using your own money to fund your product, but some more transparency would be nice.
Honestly, Facebook has a lot of frontend code. I don't think Rails is a bad choice for that. My experience with large systems is that they're usually not homogenous. There's no reason they couldn't implement the Rest API components outside of Ruby if that was their biggest obstacle to success.
Though I'm not sure it is, because even though you've obviously given this issue some thought, you didn't really articulate who was put off by their use of Rails?
Edit: To avoid confusion, Snowflake as in https://github.com/twitter/snowflake, not "snowflake schema".
Also keep in mind that I don't think app.net wants to be Twitter, it wants to be the back end public messaging system for any and all kinds of apps that have a need for a messaging or notification network.
This is what got me to back it (at the developer level). I'm just extremely curious and interested in seeing what I can do with the platform. It may start out as a Twitter clone, but I think there's a lot of potential there for the platform to evolve and grow into something more and I'm looking forward to see what I can do with it.
The reason I want to be "that guy", is that me, Murphy, and his law... have a little thing going. I develop, but definitely don't use social applications (I find them distracting and mundane). I think the concept of a completely open and distributed system like dj2stein9 mentioned is what really needs to be implemented in order to leap frog this idea, and others out there, that might be trying to come up with alternatives to the current players. However, I can definitely see this gaining traction. I love the concept of an Ad free network as well as a nice API.
Dalton and friends. I hope you're extremely successful with this endeavour, and, that you can all comment on this comment in the future with a big "I told you so".
...
"However, I can definitely see this gaining traction."
eh?
As for Twitter... they've done better than most, so far. But at some point, they'll have more pressure to show revenue. And then... how do they make money, again?
What Groupon get is a new role that introducing customers to companies by letting customers inquire information of services in the long term. Especially, companies who sell massive online education can attract more shoppers through Groupon.
Even before APp.Net I contemplated leaving Twitter because of the noise, the push towards ads and the general climate toward third-parties. I certainly would not use Twitter without TweetBot.
Easy == it wouldn't take a lot of work for him to allow someone to verify it.
Unless it becomes routine to actually employ these auditors, that doesn't really answer jtokoph's worry.
Postscript - Indeed, that's what he meant: on http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it he says "In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner."
Subjot (http://subjot.com/) would allow you to subscribe to people based on topic, but they shut down recently.
No the features will automatically get better, because you pay for the quality and all the plebs won't get in.
A quote hanging above my Grandma's oven :-P
Congrats Dalton