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#twt   #tw2adn  

Move Over Twitter, Well Hello, app.net!

App dot who, you ask? Oh no, not another social net­work! Yes, indeed, this is another social net­work, but not like any you have seen before. This new social net­work, built by CEO Dalton Cald­wel asks you for money to join– $50. Why on earth would you want to join? Isn’t it just an exclus­ive club?

I do think they are valid ques­tions, but the reason for me writ­ing a post about App.net is that it is so rad­ical in its philo­sophy and I haven’t been so excited about a social net­work since Twit­ter launched back in 2006!

I’ll get on to why app.net is so excit­ing later, but first some background…

I’m a massive fan of Twit­ter, and was an early adop­ter back in Novem­ber 2006– back when the social net­work was in its nap­pies (or diapers)! There was a lot of buzz in the tech com­munity at the time, partly because of its sim­pli­city, but also because of it’s API.

An API (short for Applic­a­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face) allows developers to have a con­ver­sa­tion with an applic­a­tion or social net­work. This could let an app post an update for you, or con­nect it to another social net­work. There was a lot of excite­ment and Twit­ter when out of its way to help developers. You could say, it was the developers that made Twit­ter so successful.

Over the past year or so, Twit­ter star­ted to make many developers very con­cerned. Back in March 2011, Twit­ter spoke out to say that developers should not con­cen­trate on build­ing Twit­ter cli­ents. Spe­cific­ally they said that you should not “build cli­ent apps that mimic or repro­duce the main­stream Twit­ter con­sumer cli­ent experience.”

This con­cerned a lot of app developers and not a few main­stream Twit­ter users. What about Hoot­suite or mobile apps such as Tweet­Bot for iOS?

Although I’m not tech­nic­ally an app developer, I do rely on many apps, and I was wor­ried about what this could mean in prac­tice. Some people were talk­ing of a Twit­ter dooms­day scen­ario, where Twit­ter would cut off the API com­pletely, mak­ing all Twit­ter apps use­less. There was a lot of con­cern and worry, and this was some­thing Twit­ter could have avoided by just com­mu­nic­at­ing with users and developers about what it meant to do.

In a blog post on the 16th August, Michael Sip­pey, Twitter’s dir­ector of con­sumer product offi­cially announced what the changes to the Twit­ter API were going to be. As expec­ted there was a pleth­ora of dis­cus­sion on the inter­net. Not all of it was bad, in par­tic­u­lar a post on the Man­age Flit­ter blog entitled “We Actu­ally Think Today’s Changes Are Mostly Pretty Good” painted a more rosy picture.

I think a post on the eCon­sultancy blog entitled “The Twit­ter API as we know it is dead” puts for­ward my feel­ings fairly well. Basic­ally, Twit­ter apps are going to be capped at 100,000 users, after which you will have to get spe­cial per­mis­sion from the Twit­ter Elves. Cur­rent apps that have a higher user base will be able to continue.

Unfor­tu­nately, there have already been a few cas­u­al­ties includ­ing LinkedIn (you can’t auto­mat­ic­ally Tweet your LinkedIn status), Flip­board and the Mac ver­sion of the pop­u­lar Tweet­Bot cli­ent.

Back in July, the web developer, tech­no­lo­gist and founder of Mixed Media Labs, Dalton Cald­well pos­ted a blog art­icle entitled “What Twit­ter could have been” which went viral. In Caldwell’s words “it touched a nerve”. This, as well as a bad exper­i­ence with a Face­book app and Mark Zuck­er­berg partly helped to launch the begin­nings of a new social net­work called app.net.

The prob­lem, as Cald­well saw it, was that free social net­works have to make money, and the only usual way to do this was through advert­ising. Due to this method, stand­ard users and developers are sec­ond­ary and advert­isers come first.

Twit­ter is already push­ing pro­moted tweets– which are basic­ally paid ads. They want to make sure that these are pushed through to users, and they want app developers to play ball with this. On July 13, Dalton Cald­well made blogged that he was “Announ­cing an auda­cious pro­posal” to launch App.net with a dif­fer­ent fund­ing model. Instead of get­ting it’s money from advert­isers, it would get it from it’s users.

http://iag.me/socialmedia/move-over-twitter-well-hello-app-net/