I never understood the point, personally. App.net was created to fix the problems with Twitter. But to me, the root problem with Twitter is that it's centralized, and App.net doesn't even try to solve that.
App.net is not a twitter substitute, and I think it was a huge mistake for them to direct new users to the "Alpha" app which is a twitter clone.
But if you’ve heard of App.net at all, you probably equate it with a Twitter clone. It’s not.... “App.net is a social platform,” says the company’s founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell. “It’s your passport to a social network of great applications. I’m trying to get the idea across that you can bring your data with you from all these different applications.”
I get that it's a "passport to a social network of great applications". But, as far as I can tell, that social network is still centralized, no? Am I missing something?
Yeah, it's centralized. It's a storage space with a nice API for putting contacts, conversations, photos, etc. Edit: it also has a nice big "export data" button that will dump all of your data from all app.net applications you use.
If I'm motivated to move away from existing social networks for any reason, it's because they are centralized...
The fact that app.net is/was pay-to-play doesn't eliminate the issues of free-to-play at all: it still has the same issues (and moreover: less virality) but now I'm paying for them.
People keep saying that, and yet I have no idea what else it does. "Your passport to a social network of great applications" is meaningless corpbabble.
I'm amazed Google haven't made this play yet. Between Drive which has a promising API and Google+ it seems like it could work amazingly. Sure it'd be centralised on Google, but that's no worse than app.net to me.
Right, but a third-party app that talks to both Twitter and Dropbox can integrate them both easily enough.
As far as liking third party clients goes, that's the sort of thing I'm getting at when I say that App.net doesn't solve what I see as the root problem with Twitter. Not liking third-party clients is just a symptom of centralization, and App.net just happens to solve this one symptom without addressing the root problem.
But if you’ve heard of App.net at all, you probably equate it with a Twitter clone. It’s not.... “App.net is a social platform,” says the company’s founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell. “It’s your passport to a social network of great applications. I’m trying to get the idea across that you can bring your data with you from all these different applications.”
www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/the-great-app-net-mistake/