I understand there's a weirdly huge amount of opposition (like that guy who freaked out on Dalton over comment a couple days ago) about the project, so I'd like to say a bit.<p>I've been on the site for a good week now (@kristian) and there's some incredible people there. Great conversation, great progress on determining just <i>what</i> this project is. That's not a bad thing — the nature of a project like this is that it is evolving constantly.<p>In that vein, I encourage people to check out an issue filed at the App.net API page on Github.<p><a href="https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/issues/33" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/issues/33</a><p>The basic idea is a reworking of the API into something more extensible. If I'm understanding correctly (I'm pretty new at this stuff), the API at this point resembles the use case of something like Twitter: <i></i>users<i></i> have many <i></i>posts<i></i>, <i></i>posts<i></i> have <i></i>text<i></i>, a <i></i>date<i></i>, etc (Rails associations, anyone?). This issue proposes that the access control on those posts be variable, to fit an infinite amount of use cases. A couple examples are Twitter-style DMs (posts visible between two users), mailing lists (posts visible between specific, but multiple users), etc.<p>I think the thing that is causing App.net problems is that people <i>think</i> they are funding a Twitter clone. The fact is that the basic system of "users" with "things" goes a lot further than Twitter. It's email, it's chat, it's notifications, it's whatever you want it to be. And that's what's fascinating — we're funding an extensible piece of the next phase of the Internet — something decentralized and more or less living and breathing.<p>So here comes the part where I tell you to fund it. But I'm not going to. It's your call. I'm a huge fan of the service already and I can tell you that within the last two days, we've had a mobile web app, native iOS app, and streaming web app pop up out of nowhere. It's a crazy active community, and now's the time to get in. If you want to fund it, you probably know by now where to do that. There's my 2 cents (though arguably that was like 80 cents).
I hate to be that guy, but who gives a crap? I don't know of anyone who actually uses any of the first 3 protocols listed here. RSS is somewhat useful, but when would I not want to use a dedicated client or some client library?<p>I'm not a backer but I'd rather they spend time developing their MVP and building infrastructure so they don't have the same issues that were so pervasive in Twitter's early years (Fail Whale every hour, anyone?).
I find myself more and more hoping app.net DOESN'T get funded. I want the messaging-platform successor to twitter to be an open, distributed platform, not a single-provider closed platform.<p>I like what they're planning to build, I just want that to be a layer built on the open internet...
As a contributor to PubSubHubbub, OStatus, and friends, I am extremely happy to see this. The protocols themselves aren't the important bits (though I like them); what matters is the commitment to meaningful syndication in and out of the platform.
Looks like the deadline is going to be tight.<p>Here's hoping that sometime Sunday night circa 11:55pm Larry Paige hits pause on the Gangnam Style/Kanye remix he's been marathoning, Chromes his way to app.net and kicks in the last 75 grand to fully fund it. Like a boss.
This is definitely a move in the right direction. These are some of the same protocols that the Diaspora* folks have settled on. It will be interesting to see the degree of compatibility they can achieve in federating.
I have never heard of any of these. Isn't email good enough? We're just transmitting text from 1 person's monitor to another, not curing cancer here (not being cynical, but with ALL the press/commotion over this, you'd think he was doing something very ambitious)