<i>The first wave of accounts is up for renewal on April 14 — just seven weeks from now. So App.net has seven weeks to convince its early adopters that it’s worth paying more money for another year of service.</i><p>I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Those of us that signed up for the $50/year deal got our subscriptions extended when the price dropped to $36. My renewal date is April 9th 2014 (i.e. more than a year away).<p>Setting aside that piece of nit picking, Marco's completely right that in order for App.net to be useful to both end users and developers it first needs to be popular. It's a chicken and egg problem in some ways (no users without interesting apps, no interesting apps without a lot of users). Opening the doors with invite-only free accounts goes some of the way towards solving that problem without the scaling issues that would come with unrestricted free accounts.
I wish there was more interest in developing on top of the tent.io protocol. Open and distributed should be the goal for the next phase of social networks.
Also app.net's $100/yr developer account is perhaps not the best way to attract developers to the platform.<p>Our apps, whether they are dedicated app.net clients like Netbot or just apps that let you post content to a user's app.net account, add to the network effect that can help app.net grow.<p>Developers should be allowed to build against the platform at the same price as regular people pay to become members in my opinion.<p>I'll be watching app.net and seeing if they change their stance on this in the near future.
I just don't think anyone wants yet another social network, with twitter, facebook (and google+ muscling its way in) no one is looking for another way to contact old friends or meet new ones... especially not at $36/year, as we saw with Instagram most people don't care about privacy or ownership, if you have a compelling product as long as it's free you'll get users no matter what your privacy policies are.
I really wonder what the true costs of running/maintaining a Twitter-clone per user would be. Is it anywhere close to a few dollars per month per user?<p>To me, it feels like it should be a tiny fraction of that, but perhaps my judgement is off?<p>I mean, compared to say youtube, you have to deal with short strings of text...
I'm personally really excited to get an invite! I think that invite systems are a great way of doing a controlled rollout while building hype.<p>I think we're about to see a new generation of apps that take advantage of user-owned file storage. For years, native apps have stored all of their data on hardware users own. Now that everyone basically has some kind of always-on file server, I think we'll be able to do similar architectures in the cloud. Imagine if we built the next Instagram by storing all the photos entirely in the user's Dropbox and just have a heavy caching layer on ec2. I'm working on a platform right now that should make building this kind of app pretty easy.<p>I think there's room for all of the competitors in the space to benefit from this paradigm shift.
I just cancelled my APP.net account two weeks ago. I tried the service for over six months. I was paying monthly.<p>At first, I enjoyed the service. But, I gradually stopped participating. Perhaps it was the lack of new people to follow. I might retry again, if more people use the service.
The best direction for App.net would be to make developer accounts free.<p>You are building a platform, you want lots of apps. It doesn't make sense to charge developers $100/year. These are the people who are going to innovate on your platform. These are the people who will make your platform more visible by integrating it into various services.<p>The company I work for has Facebook / Twitter sign up. I use app.net and I would add a signup option to our website if I did not have to pay $100/yr to do it. Not when perhaps a handful of people will use it and I will see no return on this $64 additional investment.
I've been pinging users on buddycloud, about why they signed up. Main reasons: they <i>don't</i> want another silo / want data portability and they like the idea of beign outside a company controlling their social networking experience<p>Of couse I'm biased, but permit me to dream: it would be great if App.net would consider building on an open and distributed/federated design like tent, status.net or buddycloud. The App.net guys seem great at design and building an ecosystem and the syngergies would be a really interesting alternative to Twitter/FB.
I would like an invitation too, but rather than have a hundred comments like this I made a google doc to consolidate them:<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JrOted0DLopZzwPO0aymRLfTd2SnYNGzSQRejrlt6xY/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JrOted0DLopZzwPO0aymRLfT...</a><p>Just post your email there if you want one, then delete someone's email if you sent them an invite.<p>(Mods - this strikes me as more organized, but you can remove it if you don't approve)<p>Thanks in advance!
I like everyone else was curious when App.net was first announcing this pay-for-Twitter clone awhile back. But I admit I didn't really "get it;" I thought the idea of a Twitter that's not Twitter was possibly a very interesting idea. But I always thought the idea of it being more a platform seemed to not make much sense.<p>Now, I have to say, I <i>really</i> don't get it at all anymore. What it is thing about now?
I actually thought alpha, the name chosen for the app you see on app.net website, an alpha release of app.net, a Twitter clone. And I thought app.net was a bad name for a Twitter clone, until I realize they are trying to build an app platform.
I'd love an invite if anyone has an extra! Email me if you can!<p>In exchange, I'll buy you a beer (or coffee) if you are ever in LA. Or if you are in SF I will be there next weekend, and I'll be you a beer (or coffee) then if you'd like!
Does anyone have a rough idea how many users are currently on app.net? Considering the audience is primarily developers and technologist I thought there would be some applications (particularly in the startup community) that could use it as an effective use acquisition channel. But it really depends on how many users there are, 5,000? 50,000? 100,000? more? I'd be interested to know.
I think app.net should be working on getting actual implementations of their file API out there (Instagram, every photo editing app, etc), yet that's <i>another</i> chicken-and-egg problem: what company will encourage their own users to rely on an unknown third-party service?<p>This sounds like a problem that can be fixed by throwing lots of money at it, but that doesn't fit their business model...
yeah no point! at this point its kinda mute... to be useful you need to have your friends in it! and the way its setup its not easy or user friendly to have people join, something like gmail gained traction with invite only because gmail is useful by itself you dont need anyone else using it to make it more useful, at this point it really doesnt matter if its dev friendly... twitter might suck right now for any dev, but app.net limited scope puts it in competition with way more tools than just twitter and facebook's of the world, if you are this limited, you might prefer to go use something like tumblr or do it yourself with your own hosting, why use app.net?
Does anyone else have an extra invite for this platform? I'm unfortunately a little late to the party but I'd love to check this thing out! Thanks in advance, I'll do what I can in exchange to help you back.<p>Email: 6231.32@gmail.com
If they want users, why not more payment methods?<p>I really don't want to enter my credit card information on the page of a startup.<p>But now it seems to be a little too late. Good night, sweet service.
maybe i'm just not `getting it`, but what benefits does the app.net platform offer _exactly_ for developers? I could be wrong, but usually when services go from paid to free, its a sign.