Can you convince some mom at the gym to pay $50 to use App.net? If the answer is no, then that's a big problem in building a sustainable social business. Most people don't see a "problem" with Twitter. I occasionally have seen a sponsored tweet, but it's even less obtrusive than google and EVERYBODY uses google. Convincing the soccer mom set to ditch facebook and twitter over some nebulous concept of a developer-friendly social thingy.. not going to happen.
To me it seems like the App.net gents are playing this power to the people angle just as a hook to justify funding for a twitter clone.
I can make a twitter clone (and an API to go with it) in less than a weekend. If I wanted it to be beautiful, my buddy and I could spend a month of evenings working on it and it would cost us no more than the price of the beers.
I am starting to think that this entire thing is a scam. A publicity stunt to convince people to pay $50 for something that could be built by following the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial and the Service Oriented Design with Ruby book.
This whole project is too much "inside baseball" the user on the street doesn't care, doesn't want to care because it really doesn't solve any problem for them. A pay-per-tweet platform? C'mon, who actually thinks that has business potential? Especially if just a few people are using it. None of my friends are on it. So what value is the "social" component to me? I don't know a single person on App.net, so why the heck would I spend my development time building some "robust" app atop of a platform that no one is using? You get 10 million users and then I'll potentially care about the API.
People get immediate value out of Angie's List: Vetted services. Angie's List has an actual story--everybody's had a terrible experience with a plumber, electrician, or other service. Not everybody has had a terrible experience getting data out of Twitter. Most people really don't care about that.
I think there's a vast, vast difference between the two.
To me it seems like the App.net gents are playing this power to the people angle just as a hook to justify funding for a twitter clone.
I can make a twitter clone (and an API to go with it) in less than a weekend. If I wanted it to be beautiful, my buddy and I could spend a month of evenings working on it and it would cost us no more than the price of the beers.
I am starting to think that this entire thing is a scam. A publicity stunt to convince people to pay $50 for something that could be built by following the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial and the Service Oriented Design with Ruby book.
This whole project is too much "inside baseball" the user on the street doesn't care, doesn't want to care because it really doesn't solve any problem for them. A pay-per-tweet platform? C'mon, who actually thinks that has business potential? Especially if just a few people are using it. None of my friends are on it. So what value is the "social" component to me? I don't know a single person on App.net, so why the heck would I spend my development time building some "robust" app atop of a platform that no one is using? You get 10 million users and then I'll potentially care about the API.