[ThePherocity]

Actually, this really pisses me off. Heaven forbid that all the hard work we do as developers actually come with a reasonable compensation option... like money. I think more sites need to go pay only, I'm tired of every advertising company on the internet knowing more about my buying preferences than I do. Support developers FFS.

[davidw]

The reason social networks are not for pay is because of "network effects":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

It's hard enough to get a network going, let alone make people pay for it.

[jopt]

I don't follow this reasoning. Social networks do tend to rely on network effects, but must they?

It sounds cyclic. Social networks need lots of users because they can't charge their users directly, and they can't charge their users directly because they need so many users.

I don't know that app.net has to replace Twitter for everyone. Can't they be smaller and yet successful, precisely because they charge users directly?

[dllthomas]

No, social networks need lots of users because their value is related to the number of connections. If I don't know very many people on a social network, it isn't very valuable to me.

Therefor, to offer the most value to users, those building social networks want to get rid of barriers (including payment) that might prevent more people from signing up. That, then, gets reinforced by the cyclic relationship between the fact that indirectly monetizing users tends to pull in relatively little per user while marginal costs of hosting an additional user are minimal - but the initial dynamic is an artifact of the nature of social sites to begin with.

[jopt]

I think you're taking a huge leap in your reasoning. Sure, I want lots of people I know on the network. But beyond the roughly 200 of those, I don't care if the network has a hundred thousand users or a hundred million.

Before facebook, social networks could provide a lot of value by saturating small demographics. Example: If all Swedish teenagers are on playahead.se and can all talk to each other there, they don't gain much from network expansion. The reason those networks need to grow beyond the clique where they're successful is that their business model can't sustain itself on a small number of paying users.

If app.net saturates the demographic of "people who care enough about Twitter's new API to chance $50 away," I could talk to 50% of my Twitter circle even if the total number of users on app.net is only 1% of Twitter's.

[sirclueless]

Most people I know couldn't give two hoots about talking to random people on the internet, even interesting random people. All they care about is their friends (and maybe famous/notable people). If your social network contains < 100,000 people, chances are it doesn't contain many friends, so most people will discount it. Now, us techies are used to a degree of anonymity, and are used to interacting with people we haven't met, so I don't think it is impossible that app.net will be successful in that demographic. I think it is akin to Netflix: some people just want to watch a movie, it doesn't really matter which one so long as it is a decent one; these people might like Netflix. But others only really care about that specific movie their friend said was good; chances are Netflix doesn't stream it, and they will be disappointed.

[nasmorn]

Nah facebook stopped being useful once my dad and aunt would read and post stuff there. It turned from a hangout at a friends place into sunday supper.

[dllthomas]

Well, the effect doesn't preclude the possibility that there are connections you specifically want to avoid. My point was just that the value of the social network is the connections - Facebook would be even less useful if none of your friends were on it in the first place. Managing who sees what in a way that jives with social dynamics is still something these networks are figuring out. Charging $50 is far more likely, however, to keep out my unemployed friends than my well employed parents.

[debacle]

The value of a social network is never in the technology. It's always in the users.

join.app.net is making the same mistake as diaspora, facebook, myspace, etc. You can't charge someone real money when you aren't the one providing the value.

[ThePherocity]

??? This doesn't even make a tiny bit of sense.

[vandershraaf]

Thanks, you just get me the exact term I'm looking for. It's hard to explain to "smart" people without using any computer-ish/science-ish/math-ish terminology

[trafficlight]

And yet 12,000 people payed to get a network going. Myself included.

[manaskarekar]

That's a legitimate complaint. This attempt does seem to point out how a basic online tool is considered "first world luxury" even though it might be, and probably is, an important tool that will help a lot of people create value (new companies, mergers, sharing of information that may save people money by propagating best practices etc). (Sorry for the salesman pitch.)

I mean you don't go out and guilt a carpenter for money because he bought a nice power saw instead of using a manual one?

This just goes on to imply that internet "goods" are frivolous commodities further degrading the idea of paying for software.

I wonder if they did this similar thing for other 'tangible' goods, like this silver plated ballscratcher http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010NWP9K.

[thinkingisfun]

Some things are only really useful as protocols. We don't pay for the email or http protocol either. We pay for the hosting, not for the ability to interact with others - we pay for the actual resources, not proprietary ideas. At least those of us who live in the amazing world of wonders that is the future.

Why pay for federation of content and relations, and subscription to updates? I mean sure, feel free, but for me that's just throwing money on something that isn't just pointless, it's actually counterproductive.

It is NOT buying a powersaw, it is making a contract with someone who saws your stuff. And the criticism is "when that guy runs away or starts being silly, you will STILL have to learn how to saw a piece of wood, so maybe learn that right away." - not that it's always bad to pay money for convenience.

It's the difference between a literate person paying someone to summarize the newspaper for them, and someone who can't read doing the same, never developing the desire to learn reading and writing. The latter should raise red flags. In that sense, app.net offers zero improvement over twitter and facebook. It's just another dead end.

[minikites]

So then we support developers by buying things like Sparrow, which get bought out and shut down.

[slantyyz]

When I purchase an app like Sparrow, I do it to satisfy an unmet need. That they got bought out doesn't eliminate any of the value I got from purchasing the app.

Buying an app with the intent of supporting someone implies that you're doing them a favor, and that you're not getting value for value.