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Are App.net's Crowdfunders Being Taken For a Ride?
snydeq writes "At least 10,000 people believe in App.net's vision of a messaging platform for Web apps — but it's unclear whether those people will be peers or sharecroppers, writes Simon Phipps. 'Last week App.net reached the milestone of 10,000 users who signed up for a new — mostly yet to be written — social network that looks like an early reimplementation of Twitter. Signing up people to claim user names on an (not vaporware) alpha Web service may not seem surprising or novel, but this time there's a difference: Everyone who signed up for App.net paid $50 for the privilege,' Phipps writes. 'App.net has used the crowdfunding approach, but it's not the same kind of project. While superficially similar — there's an offer of immediate use of its Twitter-clone service and reservation of the user ID of your choice — it's much more speculative. It's crowdsourcing the seed capital for a new venture, crowdsourcing the design, crowdsourcing the testing, and crowdsourcing most of the software that interacts with the venture, all without actually giving anyone but the founder a true stake in the outcome.'"
tell me how this is any different from xmpp+chatrooms+db+php rss feeds?
Because that's all it would take to create one of these.
But maybe I'm underthinking it or something.
There is an xkcd for that too http://xkcd.com/1060/
More vulture capitalism at work. Eh.. no biggie.. I don't have to spend 50 bucks to be cool.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You have it all backwards. The Kickstarter model gives an opportunity to get products built that *customers* want, and are willing to pay for, without having venture capitalist in the middle, funding everything and demanding their return. The backers' relationship to the project is that they are *paying customer*, which is less than being the owner of the company, but much, much more than just being a *user* of a free service like Twitter or Facebook.
Everyone should be signing up for this new service.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Kickstarter enables a style of capitalist parasitism that was previously only available to huge corporations to be scaled so that it's accessible to small-time scammers as well as the giant fraudsters:
Privatise the profit, socialise the risk and expense.
That's not all there is to kickstarter or to kickstarter projects but it's easy to see why it is attractive to such parasites - the crowd-funding model has most of the benefits of the stock market without the anti-scammer regulations and without having to give annoying outsiders (aka shareholders) a share in what they're funding.
I Wanna Take You for a Ride
I Wanna Take You for a Ride
I Wanna Take You for a Ride
Great, now I'm gonna be thinking about MVC2 all day.
I remember reading that a single member is worth about $1.21 in revenue to Facebook.
If Facebook thinks it can stay afloat with that kind of revenue, how can App.net justify such an outrageous price? Even if each member was worth ten times that to Facebook... how can App.net justify a $50 fee?
To be a Peer, one would have to be empowered with decentralized Libre platforms such as Diaspora*, Identi.ca, Crabgrass, etc
In those type of platforms you as a user/peer have the Freedom to do as you wish, enable as much privacy as you wish, develop the platform how you see fit, and to be without without ads if you wish.
App.net is a complete joke by contrast.
you need to take the pill for it to work my friend, dont mind the padding on the walls.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"We'd like everyone to give us $50. After that, we're pretty likely to spend all the money just before we crash and burn. If we should somehow survive, we'll be mowed down by facebook and twitter, and end up in a garbage can with google+.
But thanks for all the money! We'll have some good fun spending it!"
I bet Zuckerberg wishes he'd thought of that.
So, I clicked through and found the initial presentation funny, but if you try to click on the Vimeo link and actually type in a "desired" user name, you are forwarded to a TedX talk by Lisa Kristine, a photographer who has documented the existence of slavery in Nepal, Ghana, and India to name a few.
Kristine's message is quite compelling and worth a look on its own merits. I hope the +5 mod ends up getting the featured abolitionists, "Free the Slaves", the funds to free these inhumanely treated people.
blog
The fundamental idea is that, unlike Twitter, app.net won't be beholden to advertisers because its users are paying for the service. It's a good idea in theory.
But the thing is - support costs are ongoing, not a one-time fee. So going forward either app.net will have to continually attract new users - and at a constantly accelerating rate - or else users will have to pay a subscription fee rather than a one-time fee. Maybe that is spelled out somewhere, but I couldn't find it.
#DeleteChrome
I suspect App.net's going to crash and take all the money with it. Bluntly put, there's just not enough value in it for the end-users. There's a small core willing to pony up, but the value of something like this comes from having large numbers of people signed up and many of the people each potential user knows are on the network or are thinking about getting on. With only that small core, there's not enough people already on to make most people think it's worth setting up Yet Another Online Account and shelling out even a small amount of money per month. If App.net's lucky it'll stay below the threshold where the subscriptions are enough to pay for costs. If it's not, it'll push itself just high enough that it can't cover the bills but not high enough to start getting real economies of scale and it'll have to shut down.
Being subscription, the other path to size isn't open to it. On Twitter it's feasible to buy yourself a large audience, which makes it look attractive to everyone who wants a large audience. That hooks people in. On a subscription service you can't create large numbers of pseudo-users without bankrupting yourself in the process. That makes it harder to create even the appearance of popularity to hook people in. Note that it doesn't have to be the service itself doing this, it just has to happen. And of course being a subscription service it's not going to be attractive to the money that doesn't care about the service so much as access to all the data about the end-users. Ad-supported services it's easy to justify misuse of private data, but a subscription service where there's an explicit agreement with the end users opens up too many liability issues for their comfort.
So yeah, App.net may be a good idea but I think it's going to end up just kind of fading away.
People just like spending money on worthless crap like this. It gives them a warm glow. I doubt $50 is going to break anyone so just let them learn the hard way.
Bluntly put, there's just not enough value in it for the end-users.
The value is that Facebook is someone we do not want to stream all our data through, nor Google.
The value is that it is not Twitter, which is attempting a rapid self-implosion by rapidly killing any desire for outside use of the Twitter API for anything except voyeurism. Twitter forgot all the value THEY had was in people generate content within Twitter, that was the stupidest aspect to mess with.
The value is in having something like twitter for informal thought-following between friends and other relationships, only with a guarantee that any client can add new content into the network and any client can read it - along with the concept that you really are the master of the data you present there.
There's a small core willing to pony up, but the value of something like this comes from having large numbers of people signed up and many of the people each potential user knows are on the network or are thinking about getting on.
All there needs to be is a kernel of enough size that within that group there are people willing to follow other people.
If enough really popular people blip out of twitter with the announcement they are headed to app.net, then there could be a sizable initial expansion beyond those mere initial 10k users.
Being subscription, the other path to size isn't open to it. On Twitter it's feasible to buy yourself a large audience
And that's a NEGATIVE for App.net? On Twitter I do not follow anyone who would care about audience size. Those people exist, sure, but they are sycophants that would tag along to any system that people are watching because they go where the viewers go to seek popularity. More on that in a bit.
That makes it harder to create even the appearance of popularity to hook people in. Note that it doesn't have to be the service itself doing this, it just has to happen.
I submit that's not right, that the reason Twitter grew is not because people went there to be popular, but went there to have a back-channel to issue thoughts they really didn't care if anyone read, but thought at least friends would.
Some found popularity there and later yes, people went there to "be popular". But since it was not the reason for Twitter's success it need not be a requirement for app.net to succeed.
So yeah, App.net may be a good idea but I think it's going to end up just kind of fading away.
I don't think so. The core group seems to have a very high will to make this work; the initial backers equally determined. The only way I see it failing is epic levels of failure to build out a platform.
While that is not impossible, it's a far cry from the idea being so unsound the thing will fold in on itself.
One last thing you overlook is... you only have to buy in to add content. Right now Twitter counts are all raw, but LOTS of people sign up to Twitter only to follow, never to post... there is no cost for those people to also follow interesting App.net people (although admittedly here I am guessing at how the system will function, but you can see twitter traffic without logging in so I do not see why the same would not be true of app.net).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's crowdsourcing the seed capital for a new venture, crowdsourcing the design, crowdsourcing the testing, and crowdsourcing most of the software that interacts with the venture, all without actually giving anyone but the founder a true stake in the outcome.'"
So, in other words, it's brilliant.
We are witnesses to a retro dot-com boom, doesn't anyone notice? For the second time, Internet geeks are taking the business world for a ride. Ticket price: A couple billion bucks. There's a number of startups out there with completely insane ideas that get millions in VC funding. The Facebook IPO took heaps of money from the dumb "investors" who jump on every hype, it's not as wild as the early 2000s, but it's the same recipe.
Now if only I were ruthless enough to pitch a bullshit business plan to a room full of idiots with money. :-(
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Crowd Funding Freedom
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2012/08/crowdfundingfreedom.html
Perhaps the funding folk need to read and think.
all the best,
drew
with a little blatant self promotion.
on topic though.
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Does anyone know, is there a Kickstarter like service that provides you a percentile return on your investment depending on the success of the project, instead of just a t-shirt? If there is not I might have to start such a service of course using Kickstarter to source funds.
I don't mind Twitter being an ad-funded free-to-the-user experience.
I just want to be able to pay Twitter some money to opt out of the ads.
I don't see why Twitter can't remain free for the users who don't mid ads and at the same time offer an ad-free timeline to those who want to pay.
10,000 people just paid $50 for an ad-free experience on an as-yet unproven twitter-clone. Imagine how many people would pay for the already-established Twitter.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman