| I think it's a great idea that will fail in this implementation. The first barrier in social networks is people - getting enough people on your network to incentivize others to follow. Is the fact that app.net paid enough to draw people away from Twitter & Facebook? As a developer, perhaps, but as a user, I really doubt it. A much better sales pitch would be just "you own your data". Give users amazing import/export tools from the get go. Allow third parties to fork your system and allow seamless user migration. Build a protocol, not a service. With a business hat on, I also worry about the single silo of data in app.net. Say it does become successful, then they're a monopoly again. How can we be sure they'll fairly charge for their API usage when they realise how much it costs to hosts that much real time data? Can we be sure they won't change the playing field again? Besides all that, I don't get why he wants $500,000 up front. If he wants to "align our financial incentives with members & developers", I would have thought he'd charge a set fee to allow revenue to scale with usage. Also the language on the site is just so damn confusing. They have lots of ideas jammed in together. Most of the discussion about the idea has been people trying to figure out what they're on about. They need to figure out a sales pitch people can understand and stick to it. Anyway, lots of huge holes in this implementation IMO. I doubt it'll even get funded. |