App.net
Dalton Caldwell launched a Kickstarter-esque campaign for building App.net, a Twitter without ads. I read his post related to the idea and loved it, but I didn’t progress to actually backing the project.
The thing is, 50 dollars is a ridiculous amount for a year of something is supposed to become a Twitter-like service. Twitter has become a utility and it’s fun, but it is not worth that amount. In my opinion, the best yardstick for comparing would be a service like WhatsApp, that charges $2 per year. Why WhatsApp? It’s because that’s the only text-based paid service I have seen that has had any kind of popularity that a Twitter-like service would require. In comparison to WhatsApp, I think I’d be willing to pay maybe $5/yr for a service like Twitter. The extra amount compared to WhatsApp might be necessary because of the fact that in WhatsApp messaging is generally one-to-one, but in Twitter it is one-to-many which makes it a more difficult problem to solve.
Now, assuming I pay the 5 dollars, I still can’t see the network effects come into play with a paid application like this. In a place like India, that amount is a lot to part with and many will think twice, even thrice before paying. More importantly, many people don’t see the value in it and wonder what Twitter is really for. My prediction is that the masses will stick to a free service, particularly Twitter since it already exists. That means even if I pay the money, I will end up with a raw deal of not having the people I want to follow on the service I paid for. WhatsApp mitigated this cleverly by being dirt cheap - just a dollar at the beginning, and asking friends/people to part with that kinda money was much, much easier.
Thirdly, there’s the switch. Why would someone switch from Twitter, which has become almost ubiquitous across the web and devices? People need reasons, and good ones. The new service has to do something different, or do the same thing way better. Whatsapp nailed messaging that rivalled the likes of BBM, but the killer punch was that it was cross-device. App.net seems to have no such thing - it’s just Twitter, maybe a bit worse. Of course, these are early days but I don’t see anything which suggests that App.net will differentiate itself from Twitter.
Finally, the Twitter experience isn’t bad in its current form. Granted, it seemed better a year ago, but still, the experience is quite polished. I still hold Twitter in high regard for their design. The way it looks to me is that people are scared that the Twitter experience might deteriorate further, and they would like to have an option to shift to a different service if it does. So what App.net seems to be counting on is that Twitter will screw up, but I just don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Having said all of that, I do hope that App.net can get the backing they need to start. It would be a shame for the idea to die down before it could even begin taking shape. Let’s see what happens.
