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
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.
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, 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a good idea, although I don't see myself using it.
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.
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?
No the features will automatically get better, because you pay for the quality and all the plebs won't get in.