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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