App.net: Some Thoughts On Why It Might Fail

App.net, if you haven’t heard of it, is a pretty simple and in many ways, an attractive concept. In a sentence, it’s a social networking site not unlike Twitter, built for the people, by the people. That was the goal of launching App.net from the start: move away and avoid all of the money making evils plaguing Twitter and built something without ads and free of large conglomerate company’s influences.  Founder Dalton Caldwell describes the “audacious” project himself,

The point of my post, What Twitter could have been, was to point out that they had the chance to jump off the precipice, abandon their official apps, and let the entire service be the API. Instead, Twitter chickened out and have decided to systematically control and destroy the ecosystem in the name of advertising. I am trying to make join.app.net a “do-over” on this mistake, armed with the benefits of hindsight and a radically different business model that has fundamentally different alignment of user & financial incentives.

Translation: since you’re paying $50 for this service, we won’t need any advertiser’s money. Is this kind of plan going to work out? Well, it certainly has before and one prime example I can think off at the top of my head is SquareSpace, the platform this very website is hosted on. What’s the difference between SquareSpace and say, WordPress? For one, SquareSpace is fully hosted. WordPress isn’t. Which means that if one day John Gruber links to your website or your website appears on CNN, it wouldn’t crash due to the massive traffic. You have the sense of security that your data is safe. Secondly, you have a 24/7 5 star tech support that doesn’t take 2 days to reply to you – it usually takes less than ½ an hour for a SquareSpace technician to reply to any inquiries you have. In case you guys are wondering, no, I wasn’t paid by SquareSpace to say all of these. I just love them to death. However, the biggest difference between the two platforms boils down to one word Dalton is currently struggling with: price. In order to use SquareSpace past the 14 days free trial, you have to pay somewhere in the ballpark of $100 per year. In order to use WordPress, you just got to, well, use it! It’s free but like most of the free stuff in the Internet right now, it comes with one huge taboo: ads. Now back to App.net.

For a minute, let’s talk about platforms. There are only two kinds of platform out there for social media. “New”, and “Established”. Well, actually, let’s add an irrelevant third one: “Dead”. Like Friendster. I probably risk oversimplifying it, but for the sake of this article, we’re going to keep it as such. The “Established” platform group includes, as you probably already guessed, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and I’d argue, Tumblr. On the other hand, the “New” group contains platforms like App.net – something really promising, something that people like but yet it’s still in the experimental stage. If someone’s on the “Established” platform, it’s more than likely his friends, colleagues, parents (even though they’re never going to be friends), siblings, uncles, aunts and the guy he bumped into in the streets have an account in that platform. This begs the question: If they’re already on that platform and they’re comfortable with it, why move away? Unless there is a problem.

And there is one.

Apparently, Twitter is now trying to restrict it’s API to 3^rd party developers; which in other words means that it’s more focused on money than its users. Typical. But such a problem inevitably begs the question: how huge is it? Not at all.

Benjamin Mayo did an extensive research – and by extensive I mean collecting 1 million tweets within a 8 – 9 hour period – with the objective of finding out how damaging would it be to Twitter if one day they decided to shut the doors on third-party developers like TweetBot.

Insignificant. For Twitter, at least. In his conclusion, he writes,

For people that think Twitter will never ban third-party clients because there would be too much backlash, I think this 77% figure shows that Twitter could do it with ease. A large portion of the 23% would be happily herded to a first-party client, as they don’t really care what app they use — it just turned out that the client they first downloaded wasn’t a Twitter-owned app. The only people who would care would be the geeks, like me and anyone else who could be bothered to read this post, who actually care about the client they are using. And let’s face it, Twitter doesn’t care about geeks.

Geeks. The first time I ever heard of App.net was through my Twitter stream. Who am I following on Twitter? Geeks.

So here, if you’re still following along, we have two problems. 1) Only Geeks know of this service and only they care deeply about it. The normal user is completely fine with the default Twitter bundled in with their inconspicuous ads as evidenced in Benjamin’s findings.  2) The users are satisfied – not completely, but they are, with what they have right now. There’s really, no reason to change or switch platforms. And when the users are already satisfied with a free platform, well then what are the odds they’re going to pay for a paid platform?

As App.net moves on to their final 4 days before deciding if they have achieve the funding goals and green light the project or fail and dissolve it, they’re still roughly short of $200,000.

The idea seemed great and there was nothing wrong with the execution. By all means, it was also the perfect time to pitch a product like this. But some of the circumstances today make it seem like something idealistic yet unneeded. It’s the sad truth. Do I wish App.net success? Yes. Do I hope that they successfully fund this project? Yes. Do I think they’ll be successful? No.

UPDATE

There is about 2 days and 10 hours left. I think they're going to make it.

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Mountain Lion & Safari 6 Review and OS Giveaway

As Apple released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion into the App Store yesterday for an all time low of $19.99, there was a special thing about this release: it's only available in the App Store. No other ways. Back in the days of Snow Leopard, OS installation/upgrade was still available in CD form. As Apple progresses to eliminate optical drives for their entire line of computers, Lion (or technically, OS X 10.7) became only available in two forms: App Store or an obnoxiously expensive $69. Despite the change in download options, the adoption rate soared through the roof when compared to it's only competitor, really, Windows 7. Within 9 month, 40% of Mac users have adopted Lion whereas it took Microsoft 3 times as long to get to the 40% mark. Coming on 2012, Apple's release of Mountain Lion is now only available in one form: App Store download. Will this hurt adoption rates? I truly doubt it. Mountain Lion takes the world's simplest and easiest operating system to a whole new level. It improves on the little quirks that Lion failed in certain aspects and it added features primed to make your lives easier. I'm not certainly not going to write a whole review of Mountain Lion itself since most other technology websites went into a OS-review frenzy the moment Mountain Lion was released. However, what I'm going to do is point out the best bits from some of my favorite reviews of Mountain Lion. 

If you're the kind of person who appreciates the tiny details in Apple's new operating software, you might want to read John Siracusa's review for Ars Technica. Trust me when I say this, but you'll need a hell lot of perseverance to get through the entire review. It's spread out of 24 pages with each page containing an average of 1,083 words. The total word count is in the ball-park of 26,000 words. It blows me away how John can write so much for what I would call an incremental upgrade. It covers every single intricate detail in Mountain Lion and a little more. It took me slightly more than 2 hours to read the entire review, which I'll admit, is the first time I've read spent so long reading a review in the 3 years I've been in the industry. If you plan on reading this, then I would say that this is probably the only review you need to read. Yes, it is that good. And yes, it is that long. 

However, if you're not into that kind of thing, I get why. I really do. You would be more interested in some parts but not others. Sometimes, it is those other details that John drones on and on. A few of the other technology reviewers did a stellar job and I'm going to quote the best parts of their reviews below. For those of you asking, yes, I did read all of the reviews which I've quoted. That's some 50,000 words, I'm guessing. All of their take seems to be almost identical: It is an essential improvement over Lion. Let's take a look at the best bits from the reviews around the web.

MG Siegler, reviewing for TechCrunch

If you liked Lion, you’ll love Mountain Lion. If you didn’t like Lion, you’ll probably love Mountain Lion even more because it seems to fix a lot of the performance/quirkiness issues that some folks were having with the last version of OS X.

Nilay Patel, reviewing for The Verge

But there’s something else going on here beyond a simple purchasing decision: we’re witnessing a dramatic change in how desktop operating systems are fundamentally conceived. Mountain Lion is the first version of OS X to deeply integrate network services at every level, from storing documents to sharing photos to connecting external displays, and it seems that much lighter for it — as though Apple’s relentless charge into its post-PC era has allowed the OS X team to rethink exactly what a PC is and should be. Mountain Lion isn’t perfect, but it’s a confident, thoughtful step towards the future of desktop computing.

Jim Dalrymple, reviewing for The Loop (I'm not too sure if this is a review or not - but it can pass off as one.)

One thing that many people have been confused about since Mountain Lion was first introduced is its association with iOS. Is Mountain Lion becoming more like iOS? I asked Apple that question and the answer was “no.”

So there you have it. Mountain Lion is not trying to become like iOS, nor does it intend to. All in all, most, if not all of the changes made in Mountain Lion point to one direction Apple is heading for in the future: the cloud. Everything will be so tightly integrated through the cloud that your Mac (sorry PC people) suddenly no longer becomes the hub for all your media. It's no longer where you store most of your photos, songs, memories. It's going to be the cloud. Mountain Lion is definitely an affirmative step towards Steve Job's goal of the post-PC era. 

While I've debated on whether to include a Safari 6 review in this piece or make it a seperate piece, I've decided on the former. Truth be told, I uninstalled Chrome from my applications folder the moment I loaded Mountain Lion into my mid-2011 top of the line 13-inch MacBook Air. There are a few annoyances which I've discovered during my 3-4 hour of testing the browser that have prevented me from moving on to Safari 6 as my main browser. I'm going to some of them together with the things I like about Safari 6 in bullet point format:

• Integrated URL/Search bar. Finally. This was a glaring mistake and omission from Safari 5.
• Serious lack of extensions, which makes Safari look miniscule when compared to Chrome. Some of the most essential ones aren't even there. If you're a huge extensions junkie, you might want to hold off from using Safari 6 as your main browser, at least until it catches on to Chrome. 
• It is incredibly speedy and smooth with no lags apparent when zooming in/out and sliding two fingers to the left or right ti forward and backward, respectively. However there is a limit to that smoothness and for my machine, it's 21 tabs. From there on, it starts to slow down and the fan speeds up to around 5970 rpm. Depending on how powerful your machine is, the "tabs limit" might be more or less.
• Safari 6 pretty much forces you to use Reader from Apple, Apple's very own half-baked read it later service which they completely invented on their own. As I typically use Pocket for my read it later service, it is almost impossible to save pages from the Safari browser straight to Pocket. Emailing yourselves articles all over again. 
• It did not crash during my testing. 
• One major downside I felt was when I'm trying to bookmark a page that I like. When bookmarking something, I like to recognize stuff through their favicons, which also helps me save space on my Bookmarks bar. In Apple's attempt to simplify and minimalize their bookmarks bar, you can now only modify the name of the page you want to save. Their favicons will not appear on the Bookmarks bar.
• Apple added a new, pretty cool "Show All Tabs" feature which allows you to glance at all your open tabs,a la iOS Safari. 
• An added feature in Safari is the ability to iMessage or Tweet an article or page you found interesting straight from the browser. 

Overall, it's a major improvement from Safari 5, but not quite where it's supposed to be yet. Guess I'll still have to live with the Chromebugs. 

In conclusion, while Mountain Lion is possibly the best and most refined operating system for the Mac just yet (I'd argue for computers in general, too), Safari 6 falls short. While Microsoft have decided to radically change an operating system people have trusted and used for years, Apple decides to continuously refine their operating system until it is perfect. An analogy I can think off at the top of my head is how Apple tried, slowly yet consistently, improve their iPhones with the "S" versions, which is always an improvement from the ones without the "S" (think: iPhone 4 antenna and iPhone 4S antenna). As John Gruber pointed out in his conclusion,

That mindset and development schedule — “What can we do to make this nicer by next year?” — may well be the most important thing from iOS that Apple has taken back to the Mac.

Again, Mountain Lion isn't perfect. I'm fairly sure that we'll still discover more hidden bugs as we use Mountain Lion in our daily lives. But for now, it's as good as it gets. Frankly, it is probably the best way to spend $19.99 today, if you have a compatible machine. If you don't, too bad. 

PS: You just read 1581 words. That is 1/16 of John Siracusa's.

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Giveaway informations are here, at the bottom of the post. 

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The Dark Knight Rises Review

Let's be really short and concise. It's a truly amazing movie and a fitting tribute to the spectacular trilogy. You won't regret watching it. 

Tweetbot For Mac Review

Even in it's Alpha stages, it's a whole lot more intuitive and interactive than the default Twitter app for Mac, which has almost ever been updated. There's no loss - it's free and even though they warn you of bugs, I haven't found any using it extensively the last few days or so plus any bugs you might've found is still worth giving it a download just because it is so much better than the ones currently available on the App Store. Trust me when I say this, but at this Alpha stage, I'd wager that this is up to par in terms of performance with the official Twitter app.

On the other hand there are some pretty significant reasons why as Macro Arment explains,

First, this might be the last new full-featured client that Twitter permits. (They may not even permit this, but I bet it’ll be fine for at least a while.)

That's all you gotta know: it's the best way to access Twitter on your laptop/desktop right now. 

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Source: Microsoft Surface and Smart Covers Weren't Ready

After yesterday's Microsoft event, I was left wondering with several questions. First of all, one of the biggest differentiator between the Microsoft Surface was something known as a Smart Covers (known individually as Touch and Type Covers): basically Microsoft's keyboard for the Surface. It is a 3mm thin cover (the Type Cover is slightly thicker) that doubles as a keyboard, and therefore, allowing people the portability option of just carrying the Microsoft Surface with Smart Cover slapped on top instead of an iPad and MacBook Air. It is brimmed with features - having a touchpad, accelerometer and all sorts of cool technology within. But here's the catch. Microsoft did not allow journalists to play, or even touch a working unit of the Microsoft Surface with Smart Cover. If this aspect of the tablet is so important to them, why not let people judge it for themselves? Well, here's why: It's not ready. A low-key source from the event emailed me saying Microsoft had specific instructions not to let anyone touch a booted up unit of the Microsoft because it wasn't ready yet. No wonder they weren't able to pull an Apple and say here it is, it's available today and you can pick it up for $xx. No wonder all the technology websites and blogs reporting an hands-on did not actually mean hands-on, but rather a hands-off.

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