"Alpha was the first product out of the gate, launched in reaction to something Twitter did. Subsequently, much development was in building Twitter-like things. So its little wonder that people associate App.net with, well, Twitter. And once people form an idea of what a product is, it becomes very hard to change that idea. "
They wanted to build an open, paid version of the Twitter API/ecosystem. But the value of the Twitter API lay in the access to their 100 million+ users, and all the valuable social data generated by those 100 million+ users. No amount of "open infrastructure", no matter how clever can ever replace that. It's like buying 1000 data centers in every country, and building an entire system that can handle a billion concurrent users, and saying "Yeah, we can take on Facebook with this", then realize the hard part was getting users, not scaling the infrastructure.
a16z is already getting a return, since App.net has been profitable for a while. It's all gravy since they've made it free to sign up. The user base is about 10 times bigger than last year. It's true we don't know how many new users are paying but since that fixed costs are covered, it doesn't really matter.
Why do I have to read this comment every time App.net gets brought up? Is every conversation about App.net doomed to turn into a debate about whether it will succeed, and if not why?
In a discussion about an article written about whether App.net will succeed, that seems like a pretty logical thing to be talking about, no? It's not like he hijacked something completely unrelated and changed the topic.
I suppose that's fair, but I still find this line of thought tiresome. At least the article is arguing that App.net's problem is that it's too much like Twitter when it could be used for more, rather than the usual tired argument that Twitter's success is simply network effects, therefore App.net cannot succeed. After all, as a business, App.net is already a success; it doesn't need runaway growth to be sustained.
It is like Twitter, except it's like Twitter circa 2008/2009. It is what (many of) the early Twitter users though Twitter was and what they wanted it to become. The problem is that
1) Most people weren't around during those times.
2) Those who were have either forgotten what it was like or have come to terms with what Twitter is now.
It was a big mistake. Clinging on to the twitter model gave them something tangible to model after and improve on but the result of that is the API is largely for micro-blogging. They have some file storage now but the primitives for a broad web application building platform aren't there yet.
So from reading the API from a developers point of view, it's obvious that it's for micro-blogging. It takes a lot of imagination and effort to repurpose their API into something new.
That is a shame. 90% of the criticisms I've seen of App.net were mocking it for being 'an open source twitter' and completely ignored its ambitions to encompass general social network features.
Why is the idea that app.net is a paid version of twitter so pervasive? That's what I thought until today. Perhaps it's my fault for being wrong, but if that particular mistake is so widespread, perhaps app.net is also making a mistake by not addressing it harder.
