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App.net is Shutting Down (app.net)
Social network App.net is shutting down once and for all in March. The company said on March 14 it will be deleting all user data. The announcement comes two years after the company ceased active development on the platform. From the official blog post: Ultimately, we failed to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue between application developers and user adoption of those applications. We envisioned a pool of differentiated, fast-growing third-party applications would sustain the numbers needed to make the business work. Our initial developer adoption exceeded expectations, but that initial excitement didn't ultimately translate into a big enough pool of customers for those developers. This was a foreseeable risk, but one we felt was worth taking.
If memory serves, the original logic behind the existence of this thing was dissatisfaction with Twitter jerking around 3rd party client developers in order to ensure that their freeloading peasants were exposed to enough advertising and had suitably limited control over layout, presentation, etc.
This service was going to be the one where developers came first and you were the customer, not the product. As far as I know that part of the vision was delivered; it just turns out that demand for "Like twitter, except basically empty" isn't all that robust, no matter how nice the service is.