[sp332]

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.”

www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/the-great-app-net-mistake/

[mgkimsal]

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?

[sp332]

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.

[ronaldx]

Yeah, and that's a big problem.

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.

[mikeash]

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.

[sp332]

App.net is a platform for writing social apps that all share the same social network. Try browsing the app directory https://directory.app.net/apps/web-clients/ or the API http://developers.app.net/ whichever answers your curiosity better.

[mcintyre1994]

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.

[mikeash]

So it's Twitter+Dropbox? Still not seeing what's so interesting or different.

[sp332]

Yeah, except twitter doesn't like 3rd party clients, and Dropbox doesn't know about your twitter network.

[mikeash]

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.

[sp332]

Any twitter follower you want to collaborate with would have to make a new Dropbox account, and that account wouldn't have access to any data that she already stored in a different application. So even if you made an app to bridge all these services, it would still be a huge pain.

Why is centralization a fundamental problem?