Ask HN: What is App.net? I really didn't get it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304729

by arunoda • 14 years ago

4 11 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

The website explains it perfectly well https://join.app.net/

Watch the video.

ashcairo• 14 years ago

I still don't get it?

arunoda3• 14 years ago

No way. I watched the video. Its lengthy and he didn't tell me exactly what it is?

tree_of_item• 14 years ago

It isn't anything, besides a guy asking for half a million dollars because he thinks he can get away with it by throwing some buzz words about Twitter around.

csense2• 14 years ago

A thousand times, this.

There's no way I'm donating, when he can't even clearly express the problem he's trying to solve, let alone how his solution is supposed to be better than Twitter.

voxx• 14 years ago

If you don't get it, then why do you need to know? Obviously it wasn't clear enough to attract your attention, so why waste your time with a product that can't even explain itself clearly?

That's my thinking anyways.

iamdave• 14 years ago

This thing called curiosity.

It's not a bad trait to have, actually.

arunoda3• 14 years ago

He got my attention some how. That's why I'm interested on this :)

But he didn't convince me about what it exactly does? That's why I just asked.

Sometimes this discussion might help him to create a good web copy for http://app.net and get more paying users for his product. (I think there may have lot of people like me)

hobonumber1• 14 years ago

From what I know, App.Net is some sort of a real-time social network that is not ad-supported. Instead, it is a paid service that you subscribe to.

Pros: Developers work to please the user (you), not the advertisers. No ads.

Cons: Not free. Harder to get traction (because it's not free)

Why? Because their view is that current projects don't focus to please users.

arunoda3• 14 years ago

Ok got. Its a paid twitter. Then who's gonna pay for that, users or devs? if devs who bring the users?

csense2• 14 years ago

I didn't get it either. It seems sorta like RSS.

Here's the API spec:

https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec

If you're using it to talk directly to users, it'll be tough to beat free social networks, because that's where the traction is.

If you're using it as the back-end of an app, it'll be tough to beat something like Celery (https://github.com/celery/celery), or a hand-rolled MySQL solution. Seriously, if you look at the API tree, anyone who knows anything about databases can probably hack something with similar functionality together in a day (minus UI).

The one point that app.net might have in its favor is scalability -- if it "just works" when you have a gazillion users.

app.net would be a lot more comprehensible if the author listed a few sample application ideas and told what pain points app.net was supposed to solve.

Ask HN: What is App.net? I really didn't get it

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