Any time I can transition a service that is important to me to one in which I am the customer, I grab that opportunity quickly.
I'd happily pay gmail $10/month for mail in which I was the customer, and not the advertisers. $4/month for a user supported twitter environment sounds like a bargain - particularly as all the people I suspect I want to "follow" (or whatever the join.app.net terminology will be) - have already pledged their support for app.net.
I agree with your sentiment overall but when it comes to app.net I'm conflicted because at least half of the people I follow on Twitter are social/civic connections vs technical. As a result I can't transition to a service where I am the customer because unless at least some of those follow me the service becomes entirely different from what I am switching from. The "functionlity" of Twitter isn't the entirety of the service.
I'd join app.net if when I joined I got a few free invites to pass along to friends/family/whatever that don't really get (or care about) the "you are the product not the user" problem with Twitter/FB, or at least not in a way that they value the price to join. Something to help evangelize with. If app.net is going to be just techies that get it and will pay the premium I think it will languish a lot like google+ seems to languish among the techie crowd.
Yup - gordon@shephard.org has been going to Google Apps for at least 4+ years @$50/year - My break point is about $10/month (or $120/year) - particularly as I get the fairly awesome 2-factor auth from Google.
(I'm saying this from a regular user's perspective and not developer): First of all, what's boggling my mind about this app.net thingy is the vague pitch and description. They should explain themselves first as "a paid social network where users own their own data and without any ad disturbance". Then they can elaborate more stuff. I really had hard time to comprehend the importance of this yet-another-social network and spent a lot of time reading others' people blog/HN posts just to understand what it is all about.
Secondly, I see why they charge for it for access; I mean, we are customers when we pay for it. I get it. However, I still don't think people are willing to pay for it. Social network will forever (well may be not, but we'll see) be free because when the stuff is free, we can be sure that we can allure our close friends, relatives, or whoever in our circles to join the social network, thus the social network itself. Even more so when regular users are pretty content with the existing free social networks we have. If there are less users in a social network, the less motivation any developer to develop application on its platform.
App.net strikes me as a half-measure. It's still a centralized system with one company acting ultimately as a gatekeeper.
I want a twitter that acts more like email, on open, distributed systems that leave me in full ownership of my own content. I see very little reason for something like Twitter to go through a centralized party this way.
With enough (and the right kind of) clients a "Centralized" service could be seen as distributor to independent nodes. From there, with the right archiving / sharing features of those "clients" those independent nodes can start to become a decentralized service. The internet itself relies on centralized DNS standards organization & servers. To me, App.net (and their commitment to users being customers instead of a product) represents a move in this direction.
Maybe, but they haven't even really said anything about it. In contrast, check out http://theopenphotoproject.org/ , which has both a centralized system, but it also an open source project that you can self-host. IMHO, much better idea, implementation, and I had a lot less to be vaguely suspicious about. OpenPhoto basically did everything right that App.net is doing wrong.
When sharing a bunch of photos on OpenPhoto or Flickr or whatever, the social network available to you is not as important as the act of storing that photo somewhere. That's because you can always take that URL and paste it on Facebook or Twitter.
You can then argue that Facebook and Flickr provide value to photo enthusiasts because through them you can see the photos of friends and other people.
But that's not really what OpenPhoto is about and let me quote its description:
A photo application that lets you store
your photos on Dropbox, Amazon S3 or in your garage
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually thinking of using OpenPhoto, but that's only because I want my photos backed-up in the cloud and easily accessible whenever I want, and not much else.
I backed this almost immediately, and expected them to be a lot closer to the goal than they are now (still more than $300,000 off with only seven days to go). I'm very surprised with the apparent lack of resonance with the idea from people around here.
So what are some of the reasons you aren't backing?
The problem with App.net (as it's currently described, anyway) is that it's halfway between what people who love Twitter want and what people who hate Twitter want, which makes it less than an obvious sale for both.
People who love Twitter want... Twitter. App.net doesn't interoperate with Twitter; it's another, separate silo. There's no guarantees that your Twitter friends will move to App.net with you, which limits the appeal if you live in Twitter.
People who hate Twitter hate it for a variety of reasons. App.net doesn't address most of these. If you hate Twitter because they kneecapped their developers, guess what, there's no guarantees App.net won't kneecap their developers five years from now either. If you hate Twitter because it's a centralized, proprietary system, guess what, App.net is centralized and proprietary too. If you hate Twitter because of its scaling problems, guess what, there's no guarantees that App.net (which, as noted, is as centralized as Twitter is) will be any better at dealing with that stuff. And so forth.
Personally, I fall into the latter category; I have lots of problems with Twitter. But nothing about App.net screams to me that here is the solution to those problems. Instead it just feels like Twitter with a different owner and a subscription fee -- which are just about the only ways at this point you could take the idea of Twitter and make it less appealing to me.
I'm not backing it because there isn't a real need for it. It would be nice to use a twitter like service ad-free as a customer and not as a product but whenever you charge for a service like this attracting people to it is very difficult. A lot of people I know love and user twitter. None of them would pay for this. So, why would I pay for this if none of the people I care about are using it?
To me it seems like Twitter pissed this guy off so he decided to try and build a competitor. It's a nice idea (and something us geeks can get behind) but if he did any market research I bet he would have discovered very quickly it's a lost cause. The vast majority of people aren't going to pay for a product they can get for free and people are the most important aspect of a social network. Without people it's doomed to failure.
The ads I get on twitter and Facebook are not a dealbreaker for me. I dont understand how its an improvement over either service with the exception that there are no ads and will likely protect my data better. (Thats another issue im not particularly worried about).
I don't think this project will work due to several inherent economic factors. If I understand correctly app.net takes a free service (twitter, fb) has removed the best features of those services and then wants to charge money for that product. Dalton has put himself in the position of a reverse browser war which doesn't seem very viable to me.
Why does somebody have to do something? Twitter has made some controversial moves recently but the only people they've really annoyed are developers. Users have had no major problems. Why would tens of millions of people start paying for something they already get free and like? I think that this project is a response to the developer community Twitter has annoyed but there is no real market for it. A quick look at how little backing it's got shows that it isn't really needed.
During the browser wars, web browsers went from paid software to free. Dalton is trying to do the reverse by turning social networking streams into a paid service.
How many instances of groups of very smart people with a great product vision and the technical ability to deliver it are there that set up non-profit companies to give us all their brain-child for free? I'd prefer it if they wanted to do it in a non-profit and give all the excess revenue to 3rd party devs but this is much better than waiting for a unicorn to turn up.
If ads interrupted my experience, then maybe it would become a pain point worth addressing or paying for. Until then, I'll stick with the free, ad-supported Twitter.
One argument for app.net appeared to be "controlling my own data" so I thought I would point people toward what Twitter has said about giving users the ability to download all of their tweets soon.
I hope they deliver but I'm not too worried about it if they don't. I currently archive my tweets using IFTTT: Delicious.com for the ones with links (http://ifttt.com/recipes/332), Dropbox for the whole stream (http://ifttt.com/recipes/37991).
What bothers me the most about Twitter is how, with a few sharp blows, they've destroyed the 3rd party client / app market which was perhaps the most amazing aspect of Twitter and it's surrounding culture when I first started using it in 2008
The 140 character limit is important though. It's necessary for the service to work over SMS which is hugely important to users in many developing countries. It's also been the key to twitters success in various uprisings in the middle east when internet access was shut down.
I'd happily pay gmail $10/month for mail in which I was the customer, and not the advertisers. $4/month for a user supported twitter environment sounds like a bargain - particularly as all the people I suspect I want to "follow" (or whatever the join.app.net terminology will be) - have already pledged their support for app.net.