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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.
We envisioned a pool of differentiated, fast-growing third-party applications would sustain the numbers needed to make the business work.
It means: we hoped a bunch of people would do most of the work for us for free.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In May of 2014, App.net entered maintenance mode. At that time we made the difficult decision to put App.net into autopilot mode in an effort to preserve funds and to give it ample time to bake.
This sounds like the real reason the platform died. They already effectively signaled they were dying 2.5 years ago. Why would any third party waste time investing in a platform when its creators aren't investing in it?
I just took a look at their 'about' page - I'm still none the wiser what they (were) up to. Advertising and outreach definitely wasn't big on their list of priorities it seems. They probably have more 'mind share' today, because they're closing down than they've ever had before.
A site no one has heard of shutdown, and makes first page news.
The promise of ADN was a "social backbone". You build the social network once, and add it to your app. They had a Twitter clone as a demonstration product (called Alpha). But the idea was, you didn't need to reinvent the wheel every time you created an app. So you sign up for ADN once. Someone invents Vine? Well, they integrate with ADN, and voila! Once you download Vine you have all your friends already there. You don't have to reinvite them and re-friend them on the latest app of the month. When you discover Instagram, well they are plugged into ADN so again your friends are already present and you don't have to find them again under a different username or whatever. That was the idea. The problem was1) They decided to go ad-free, so both developer and user accounts cost money initially. There was eventually a free tier of user accounts. 2) Outside of developers reading the spec, follow-on apps were slow in coming so for a long time, it was just a paid and ad-free alternative to Twitter. Eventually there were apps like Whisper, and Climber for example that duplicated Instagram and Vine and created private chat rooms and instant messaging like Whatsapp. The thing was, really they wanted to be an API, and no one was interested. Why share your most valuable thing, users and their data, with someone else? How do you monetize that if it's given away to everyone else on the network and to all apps? Better to build walls around the garden and sell ads. It's too bad. It had promise.