Before the great gold rush of venture capital and public offerings, there was an idea that the Internet should not just change the world, but actively make it a better place. Profit and empowerment, the voices said, should coexist.
This idealism seems increasingly quaint -- and to some extent, we pay for its death with things like the NSA's PRISM surveillance program -- but pockets of it remain. Change.org harkens back to a time when Internet services paid more than lip service to the notion of changing the world. So does Project Gutenberg. But those are merely the obvious examples. You'll also find the old idealism in App.net.
Conceived and launched a year ago, App.net is a platform for social applications, a place where users can log in and do a bunch of stuff all on one connected network. They can share links, videos and photos, they can upload, store and share documents, they can write status updates and hold public conversations with their friends. And unlike the big-name social networking tools we all use today -- the ones that keep our data under lock and key, study our behaviors, and serve us targeted ads -- openness is central to the design of App.net. At every point along the way, users have total control over how their pieces of data -- uploaded files, personal information, and social connections -- are stored, shared, or monetized. Developers are assured that App.net itself won't compete with them or limit the functionality of their apps. It's the antithesis of the status quo in social networking. A garden without a wall, an ecosystem insulated from corporate influence. Something many of the wide-eyed watchdogs of Internet would argue that we desperately need.
App.net may finally be ready to change the world — but first it has a lot to overcome, not the least of which are the many misconceptions about what the hell it is exactly.But if you've heard of App.net at all, you probably equate it with a Twitter clone. It's not. Maybe you know a little bit more about it, and think it's some open-source hippie version of a social network, like Identica or Diaspora. It's not that either. App.net is very much about making money.
Maybe you've heard it called an elitist version of Twitter, where anyone willing to pony up the cash gets a private place to chat without being bothered by riff raff with @ signs. But that's a misconception too.
"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."
Imagine this. You sign up for Vine, and build up a robust friend network and library of videos. But then you try out Instagram's new video sharing, and decide you like its editing features a lot better.
Normally, this would mean starting over, with no friends and no files. But let's say that both of them were just applications that ran on top of App.net. Instead of starting over, when you fired up Instagram for the first time, your friends and videos would be there waiting for you. That's App.net. Or at least that's what it wants to be.
"You're just giving applications access to your data in your personal cloud," explains Caldwell. This is a surprisingly radical idea: the notion that users own their data and social connections. (Just try, for example, to port all your Facebook photos over to Twitter.)
And if the way it handles data and connections is novel, the company's business plan is radical. App.net collects money from users, pools it, and redistributes it to developers. Want to own your data, and your social graph, and be able to migrate it from place to place as you see fit? Then you're going to have to pony up and pay. (There is a free tier, but it limits the number of social connections you can establish to 40.)
It's designed on the premise that social infrastructure is too important to be free. It should, Caldwell argues, be treated like a utility.
In simple terms, App.net is a tool that affords you control of your data and network. It lets developers write apps and tap into users' existing social graphs and stored files. Its first app was a Twitter-esque status updating service. But over the past year, it's been quietly transforming itself, and with its free tiers and passport service, it may finally be ready to change the world -- but first it has a lot to overcome, not the least of which are the many misconceptions about what the hell it is exactly.
An Idea Is Born
In August 2012, Twitter published a now-infamous blog post that laid out quadrants of activity where the company was encouraging development, and specified others to avoid - things like building Twitter clients or other products that competed with its own. It announced that it would be setting a limit on "user tokens," or the number of accounts that a 3rd party Twitter client could support, at 100,000. This was all about its ability to serve ads. And it meant that very many developers who had grown their businesses around Twitter's platform were about to be yanked up by the roots.
It was reviled. "Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead," summarized John Gruber on Daring Fireball. It was a common sentiment. Twitter had long positioned itself as the "free speech wing of the free speech party." But now it was signaling that it wanted to clamp down on one form of speech: its API, the programming interface developers could use to tap into its massive stream of real time data.
For years, critics (most notably Dave Winer) had been warning what would happen if Twitter completely owned real time short form messaging. But despite attempts from for-profit and non-profit services alike, nothing ever came of it.
But this time was different. People were frustrated with Twitter the company, not Twitter the product. It wasn't about Fail Whales that kept them from reading tweets, it was about the API revisions that kept them from making money. For developers who had built businesses on top of Twitter's platform, the new rules threatened to destroy their livelihoods.
Already surfing this wave of bile and doubt was Dalton Caldwell, who wrote in July of last year what, in retrospect, reads like a fairly anodyne blog post. But at the time, it felt like a call to arms. He lamented the outcome of Twitter's internal struggles to find a business model, which saw an advertising camp win out over the part of the company that wanted to charge a fee for services. He called this move "a tragic mistake" for Twitter.
"If you are building an advertising/media business," he wrote, "it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all 3rd-party clients, and lock down the data in the global firehose in order to control the 'content.'"
Caldwell had reason to be leery of Big Social. It had made him wealthy, but it also meant the destruction of three different companies he'd built. He had founded iMeem, one of the Internet's largest social music services, and sold it to MySpace, which unceremoniously shut it down. He followed that with a company called Picplz. It let users take filtered photos and share them on other social networks, but was more or less made irrelevant by Instagram. Next came App.net, in its original incarnation it was a service built on Facebook's OpenGraph that showed which applications your friends were downloading. Facebook was supportive, until it rolled out Facebook App Center, which did the same thing, and crushed App.net in the process.
Caldwell's conclusion from all that was that social platforms shouldn't have any incentive to compete with the developers building apps that ran on top of them -- something advertising provided. Caldwell concluded that social networking infrastructure was fundamentally incompatible with an advertising-based business model. Let the applications serve ads to the people, but the company that provides the backbone structure, the tissue connecting users, should be more akin to a utility than a broadcast network.
Two weeks after his original post, he returned with a plan.
"I believe so deeply in the importance of having a financially sustainable realtime feed API and service that I am going to refocus App.net to become exactly that," he wrote. Caldwell's team had already done the bulk of the work. App.net had an iOS app, the infrastructure to handle millions of API requests, and documentation for developers to build against. "This isn't vaporware," he said.
To get it off the ground, they turned to crowdfunding. "We will only accept money for this financially sustainable, ad-free service if we hit what I believe is critical mass. I am defining minimum critical mass as $500,000, which is roughly equivalent to ~10,000 backers."
A month later, App.net had raised over $800,000. Now it was time to ship or shut up.
Soon after announcing the project, Caldwell unveiled App.net's first product: Alpha, a Twitter-like short form messaging service that let users broadcast 256-character messages. If you wanted in, you had to pony up $50. Clearly, this wasn't something that appealed to most people.1
That's where the new narrative of ADN as Twitter for elitists took hold, especially because its users were decidedly male and white, and because it launched just as industry critics were starting to launch attacks on the white male dominated world of new social services.
But worse than being mistaken as Twitter-for-white-elitists was being mistaken as Twitter-for-anything. It meant that people had confused platform (App.net) for product (Alpha).
"I think that's been a problem for ADN since early on," says David Chartier, an initial backer of ADN and the product marketer for AgileBits software. "Short messaging was the easy way to pitch it since it's easy for most folks to wrap their heads around, but I think they and the early dev community got stuck there."
You Have the Wrong Idea
Chartier is correct. If you look at the most popular apps on ADN, they're almost all Twitter-like clients. There's Netbot, the iOS app that's nearly identical to Tweetbot (and no wonder, both are made by the same developer). There's Kiwi, which is a desktop client that also looks a lot like Tweetbot. And then there are the things that don't look like Twitter, but do look like other things. There's Sprinter, a photo-sharing app that's similar to Instagram. Climber is a video-sharing app that (to be generous) owes much to Vine.
Alpha was the first product out of the gate, launched in reaction to something Twitter did. Subsequently, much development was in building Twitter-like things. So its little wonder that people associate App.net with, well, Twitter. And once people form an idea of what a product is, it becomes very hard to change that idea.
But Caldwell is unrepentant and disputes that App.net has an identity problem. So what if some percentage of the few people familiar with it think it is something other than what it is?
"The reason we didn't launch with a free tier is we didn't want to launch with huge swaths of people having the wrong idea," he tells me. "By keeping it so small so that mainstream people would never have heard of it, much less have an account or logged into it was a way to keep it new."
In other words, what matters are the hundreds of millions of people who haven't heard of it at all. What matters is that by the time those people encounter it, it's going to have all kinds of new apps and experiences and various tiers of membership. And starting off with a Twitter clone? Well, Caldwell says that made sense too.
"The reason that I think making Alpha was so important was because we were able to deliver something people could use and we shipped an API," says Caldwell. "That created the kernel. Additionally, it bootstrapped itself. The developers used the thing to talk to each other. It was a communication platform to bootstrap the communication platform. If there was no Homebrew Computer Club, there'd be no Apple. There has to be some coming together point where people have a shared vision of what will be.
"If we delivered no UI at all, there's a zero percent chance we would have succeeded. If what we'd actually delivered was a blank slate, it definitely wouldn't have worked. A lot of people who became fans and supported us were originally convinced we would be vaporware because of things like Diaspora, and even Pebble. That's a very common problem for crowd-funding."
And it does seem like ADN has some momentum, at least with developers. Its crazy developer program -- one that awards a $30,000 bounty per month to popular apps -- gives devs a reason to come check it out and experiment. It finally launched a free tier, which means users can at least try before they buy. And perhaps most intriguingly, it took a step towards in-app signups -- so that you don't have to have an ADN account to try an ADN app. (Although you do still get kicked over to the iTunes store, at least with iOS apps, to download Passport, the company's account management application.)
"Right now we're still in the experimentation phase; they're rapidly updating the API and developers are experimenting with what's possible," says Chartier. "But increasingly we're seeing not just different kinds of apps, but more polished apps that offer a great user experience."
And it's true that innovative, high-quality apps are starting to appear. Patter lets you set up chat rooms, public or private, and it's quite good at it too. Orbit is a file management device that lives in the menubar. Whisper is a nicely made private messaging tool. Ohai is a delightful, beautiful journaling and location-tracking app.
But there's still something missing, that seems totally obvious: a game. App.net needs a Dots or a Candy Crush or a Words With Friends that plugs into its social sphere. Something that isn't just useful, but fun. Something wonderful.
And when you visualize a socially-driven game, you can imagine a scenario that goes something like this. App.net nails down in-app sign ups, so nobody has to download another app to join -- or even realize they're joining for that matter. Caldwell's developer incentive program (and new partnership in YCombinator) gets some young hungry programmer's attention, who builds a hot shit game with a strong social component. The ADN game rolls up the iTunes charts, where other people, simply curious, download and play it. App.net crosses the million user mark. It's in sustainable territory, and other developers rush in to repeat the trick. Growth goes up, and to the right. At some point, we all take it for granted that we own our own data, and our own social graph.
Or here's another way it might go down. There are no breakout apps. There is no WhatsApp or DrawSomething. App.net remains a plaything for developers and alpha geeks for some time, but they eventually tire of it and move on to try their hand at Dropbox. The wrong idea sticks around. Two years from now, you try to remember when you last logged in. You can't. And the world is exactly the same.
1 13:13 EST 08/20/13 The original version of this story misstated the financial details of App.net's crowdfunding campaign.
