So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down.
And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.
Not sure what more you can do when the business isn't going well. 2+ years of maintenance, open sourcing, 2 months notice, data export, no additional billings.
I continue to be at least somewhat optimistic that non ad-supported models are worth trying. It seems like Patreon is doing really well and is perhaps something we can all learn from.
Yeah, for app.net I think it was more chicken and egg that killed you than paid per se. Pay presents an especially difficult chicken and egg problem because not only do you have to get people to part with their time to sign up you have to ask them to pay for what may potentially be no value provided.
I remember trying to explain why it wasn't a stupid idea to people way back when it launched on HN, and had kind of assumed that it'd died years ago.
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Hypothesis: If you can find a way to provide value while you build up the network, the product would do better.
Second hypothesis: If you can find a way to acquire valuable users with a low-effort funnel and 'leech' users with a paid funnel that would also make the product perform better.
Taking these as assumptions for a moment, this would imply a natural advantage for federated networks if they provide interoperability between different services that have value on their own without network effects.
Also it's pretty awesome to see a shutdown accompanied with an open sourcing. If every startup did this, we'd have a ton more open source code out there to play with.
This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, end of an era. App.net was created at a time when discontent was high with how Twitter was treating its users and 3rd party app developers. Even though App.net wasn't hugely successful, its existence provided a needed check against Twitter exercising user-hostile control over their platform.
However, it has not been a viable platform (one that people actually used) for many years, so while I am saddened that it is finally being shut down, I'm not surprised. Many thanks to Dalton and everyone who built it and kept it going these many years!
App.net came out in 2012, and while I can't really remember the specific areas of discontent that I experienced with Twitter back then, here's an article I found:
I think what everyone was worried about back then was that Twitter was changing the nature of what Twitter was. Twitter started placing limits on API tokens, introduced new UI in the form of cards, which could also be used for ads, etc. There was a sense that the freedom and openness of the Twitter platform was quickly diminishing.
Twitter's response was basically no response, but in a good way. They slowed down making those sorts of radical changes, and to this day you can still browse Twitter with a 3rd-party app like TweetBot and never see cards or ads.
If people were dissatisfied with Twitter, they could leave and join App.net. If enough people did this and App.net reached critical mass, it could have become the default service of its kind.
Since the primary motivation for people switching to App.net was them getting upset at Twitter, they slowed down the frequency and breadth of the changes they were making to their service so as to upset fewer people and less frequently. In the end, this was a positive outcome for users that liked Twitter exactly the way it used to be and didn't want it to change.
Of course, Twitter's changes may not have been motivated by App.net at all, but even if not there was still an escape hatch for users if things got too bad.
I would assume it's just a case of installing your chosen software package on a web server. I don't know how easy that is. The more mature packages are probably better-documented in this regard.
App.net and Medium have the same issue (why advertising is more lucrative than selling blogging software directly to content creators):
Let's say for every one content creator that are on average 100 eyeballs on the content they create (1:100). Almost universally, the 100 eyeballs can be translated to more economic value than the 1, and hence why the advertising model is so lucrative.
App.net from what I understand wasn't so much trying to sell to content creators as it was trying to create a Social-Graph-As-A-Service thing. I thought the original pitch was essentially two fold:
build your network with App.net and users can basically just opt-in automagically importing their data from other App.net networks thereby reducing the friction and hopefully making it easier to over come the ghost-town problem.
build your network with App.net and tool makers (including you) automatically get a well defined/robust/tested API to write apps against to interact with your network.
The advertising model is "lucrative" because that's where all the money is shunted, because that's what MarCom knows how to do. There's a century and a half of advertising agencies who need to capitalize on their training, and the newspaper/TV model is what we've gotten for it.
Personally, I always wanted to see a site that has ads and is free to read, but charges a small fee to create an account - just to see if it would help reduce trolling and sock puppets.
Not necessarily. I'd make some comment about people's price elasticities (or maybe "people overvalue free"), but I'm not exactly sure what it would be.
Really loved and appreciated what Dalton, Berg, and the team was able to build. It was an awesome community for quite a while. Great job and sorely missed.
I applaud Dalton and Bryan for keeping ADN running for nearly 3 years after it ceased development. In truth, I think most of the users left back in May 2014, but it's still admirable that they kept it running.
If you'll excuse the self-plug, I wrote about the death of ADN back in 2014 and re-reading my post, I think it holds up.
App.net'S failures, IMO, were not a result of being too early as Dalton suggests. Instead, they failed at building a company. Confusing branding, wrong messaging, and ultimately a product without a need. That's why app.net failed.
This reeked of being dead the day it launched, so it's hardly surpising, but it's also tragic.
Why is it so hard to create a Twitter alternative that's popular and effective? Does the world tend to gravitate towards single standards for these things, like Facebook, HTTP or email?
Yeah basically that. People don't want extensible services or open platforms. They don't want full control over their data. They don't want 100% privacy. These are all niche things that like less than 1% of people want. Most people just want a thing that does one basic job and does it good enough.
less than 50000 downloads in Android and 60 reviews in AppStore in 5 years. I think you can get better numbers without marketing.
Seriously, whatever you do, you need to spend the same amount of time promoting it, otherwise no one will notice. 50000 downloads is nothing in 5 years, it is 2.7 users a day. If you are in SanFrancisco you can get more than 3 downloads a day just going to the street and talking with strangers.
Where were their budget for marketing? At least I would have expected 500k in marketing and 1$ per install, them we can talk about the users not liking the product or whatever.
UPDATE: you can keep downvoting (I would appreciate a feedback comment to explain the downvote) but it doesn't change the fact that marketing is more important than the product and they didn't spend on it
And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.
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