I'm going to look at this from their perspective. They have a ton of subscribers right now, but they have 2 problems on the near horizon:
1. They know that a lot of subscribers have abandoned the service and probably won't pay again, but they don't want to have to report that the number of users is declining once those subscriptions start to expire.
2. Acquiring new customers is not happening fast enough to keep critical mass or grow.
This move is to address those two problems. I also think it's a negative signal for the future of the company because I don't think a limited free account will get people to join. While they make clear that they are not a Twitter clone, the concept of following people is a Twitter concept, and you don't have those same limitations on a Twitter free account.
There's something in general that bothers me about App.net. In my career I've found that software engineers rarely are able to climb the org chart like business people are. The reason I've found is that engineers in general have a certain disdain for schmoozing and company politics, so they try to isolate themselves from it. App.net's marketing pitch I feel appeals to that isolationist desire and that's part of the reason it was such a hit.
And the million dollar question is how do I convert my paid account to a free account? Will it happen automatically after the year I got from the KickStarter-like program runs out? Also being able to follow a maximum of 40 people sounds like a feature, not a bug.
The pledge was for $50. In October, the annual fee was lowered to $36. As a result, current members received 5 extra months on top of the first year. By the time your credit is up, in February or March 2014, I'm sure you'll be able to change your account to a free plan.
In the MMORPG world, even handing out free trials, let alone going free to play, is often a sign that a game that's dying. It's a last-ditch effort to keep things going for a few more months.
I think that's the wrong way of going about what they're offering. Either they're lying in that blog post (which would be very disingenuous to the people who pay them to operate, the users), or they legitimately had an idea of a free model with benefits added on and wanted to get some buffer cash before going that way.
Everyone saw the writing on the wall about growth when it launched, and the best solution to drive new users (and encourage them to upgrade) is to offer a service at a model that allows them to "get their feet wet" without signing up with a credit card.
Well I don't think it's dying. This is the sign of a bigger pivot (the free tier being a smaller one) coming up. Given their track record I think this might turn into something more along the lines of google plus.
It's not always a bad sign, as both WoW & EVE Online have trials and are both running quite strong. In most cases, however, unless the game was launched with free trials/F2P in their business model, it's a sign that they're struggling to get/retain users.
Well, App.Net was launched with two Freemium services (GitHub and Dropbox) as their model for a successful service. I have no reason to disbelieve Dalton when he says Freemium was always the plan, especially since ADN users have been clamoring for a free tier pretty much since day 1.
So remember this: at its core, App.net is an ad-free, subscription-based platform, a backbone, a dialtone. [1]
I had to go back and find that to make sure I wasn't misremembering. If the free tier includes a cap on the number of people you can follow, has the "we're not just a pay twitter" angle been abandoned?
Anyone see the 40 people limit as a problem with this working? I would think limiting connections would limit the usefulness of the service, leading free users to dismiss ADN.
I would like to see ADN become a fully armed and op.. err fully sustainable service (I paid up when they started), but I'm wondering if they should have went further with the free tier.
For a lot of people, the only ADN functionality they really care about is that which replicates Twitter. How do you provide a free tier to these people that doesn't remove any incentive to go paid? Limiting the number of people you can follow seems like a great way to do this.
I'm interested to see what uses people come up with for ADN's storage. If there are some neat uses, that could be a great incentive.
I don't disagree with the limit providing a great incentive to go paid, but when a free user joins, there is a point where the user decides this service is neat/useful enough that he wants to pay for it. I wonder if this limit might hinder people reaching that point.
If anything, it gives incentive to follow only people you truly care about instead of the "everybody follow everybody" model Twitter has. Probably a lot less people willing to follow companies and more following users & interacting with a smaller pool of them.
You still shouldn't get spammers - if all of a paid member's invites go to people who get blacklisted as spammers shortly afterwards, that member shouldn't get any more invites to offer.
I thought that the paywall was supposed to keep degenerates like me away from those cliques that formed during the early years of the term "blogosphere" Wasn't the whole point of this to make you pay to listen to people like Scoble?
The only people who care about platforms are people like us. The average user doesn't care about App.Net being a "more civilized" Twitter.
I haven't followed app.net too closely, but was that fact that "[...] [they] initially conceived of App.net as a freemium service" a secret at all? From the tone of the comments so far, it's like this entire thing is a surprise.
The second that App.net was announced and I saw the prices, I was out. You don't pay money to develop for a service that only developers are using.
The price was extremely high in comparison to what it offered: Sure, Apple charges to develop for iOS, but iOS has a few hundred million credit-card enabled customers buying software. App.net had a bunch of already-paid developers using the service.
I tried to figure out the point through a few emails with the creator but ultimately it felt like a service for developers flush with spending money to join a sort of app vanity press.
I'm glad that it's opening up now and I'm suddenly starting to get interested in the project!
There are a lot of users & developers who've been burned in the past by Twitter's moves, one way or another. The problem with requiring cash is that it does very little to encourage people to try on the service without being committed to it.
By moving to this free (with 40 people followed) model, they can allow users to try and thus get more that are likely to upgrade to the higher tier when they want more.
Developers (like @falcon_android) that have hit Twitter's token limit are also getting encouragement to move or support it - as it's not a small subset but a very large one of people who can use the service.
This is entirely true, but App.net's model relies on a healthy third party app ecosystem to drive new users & keep existing ones. The Twitter API limitations aren't a point that can be paid for or anything of the sort. As far as we've seen, once a client hits the magical 100,000 token limit, no client has come out of the process with more tokens.
I pay for Github because the few private repositories I have benefit from Github's frequently expanding feature set and make it worth the cash I pay each month easily. I think it's worth it to support a service with an iteration cycle that actively benefits its users to the point where paying for it is worth it.
I feel the same about App.Net. They're constantly coming out with new things, such as the hugely-more-powerful-than-Twitter Messages API and the Files API, and they're enabling devs to build apps for ADN that are significantly better than the offerings for Twitter. All in all, I enjoy using ADN far more than I do Twitter, to the extent that it's worth paying for.
Bitbucket's free private repositories is a godsend to academic and other small-time projects. Github can keep their hold on "public code repos as social networking".
I prefer Twitter over App.net. So far there isn't any reason for me to switch. I have no complaints, so I have no need for a competing service.
Anyone else out there feel the same way? App.net's environment seems hostile (like following only up to 40 people), compared to the friendly environment and user experience with Twitter.
No complaints? The sponsored tweets haven't annoyed you yet? The inability to use some twitter clients because Twitter refuses to give out more licenses hasn't annoyed you yet?
I use Twitter a lot, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't jump at the first chance of a real alternative.
I haven't found the sponsored tweets annoying at all. I mostly don't even notice them. I scan my feed and I only pay attention to the tweets which interest me. Everything else could be an ad as far as I'm concerned.
The number of sponsored ads don't seem high enough to make me feel like it's annoying.
As for Twitter clients. Eh, not sure I care so much. I just need a decent client which doesn't suck.
I think their recent decision sort of suck but as a user I don't know that I care too much.
This is exactly how the normal consumers look at these things. Outside of my tech life, no one cares at all.
They just joined Twitter, years after it was launched, because they wanted to see what interesting people & celebs were saying. Heck, the probably even heard about Twitter from an advert or some sort of marketing material, so adverts within Twitter won't bother them/me.
Yes, the (few) sponsored ads seem no different than any other tweet you wouldn't care about anyway. I for one am quite accustomed to sifting through things this way, the ads don't seem like much of an extra burden, at least to me.
I feel like we as nerds should think in the long term.
Communication should be controlled by the users. Think about all the companies who were screwed over by Facebook's "Likegate." Decentralization is why I prefer Tent and IRC. App.net seems acceptable as well because of the open nature, though it is centralized.
Well I'm sure that plenty could be done to improve Twitter, but I'd ask whether app.net does any of those things. Last time I looked it is pretty much exactly the same.
Thats exactly how I feel as well. I would pay for a social network if it created a new/better experience for me, but App.net is a twitter clone. What can I do on app.net that I cant do on twitter? What part of the experience do they beat Twitter on?
App.net also hasnt been successful enough to attract the majority of people I follow on Twitter. So their value proposition for me looks like this: Im paying for something that looks, functions, and feels like Twitter without the people to follow to create that content.
That's a limitation for people who build apps, not for the users. And it's not even that, it's a limitation for people who build apps and expect to scale them quite a bit, which, given the crowded space, doesn't really happen by accident.
This has pretty much no influence on users. It might slower the innovation a bit, but it's not like there's much innovation happening there to begin with..
I also said use. The primary thing I dislike about Twitter is that they now limit apps to 100K tokens. This past weekend Falcon Pro, the Twitter client I use, reached the limit and is now unable to offer it to additional users.
This also impacts me as a user because the official Twitter apps have special privileges that third party apps do not. I believe this is why third party apps do not support push notifications.
I have 3 invites. First people to answer these questions correctly gets one (only answer one question):
* What is the integral of "x + 2"?
* How would you implement coroutines with continuations? (Just a very brief description is fine) (edit, if nobody answers this in a few min I'll just invite people)
You can implement coroutines with continuations with two functions:
def resume
callcc do |cc|
$current = self
@caller = cc
@resumer.call
end
end
def self.yield
callcc do |cc|
$current.resumer = cc
$current.caller.call(cc)
end
end
`resume` (on a coro) will store what coroutine we're entering (globally) and the caller-continuation (so we know where to go to after Coro.yield). It will then invoke the `resumer`-continuation. `Coro.yield` will store the `resumer`-continuation on the coro (so we know where to go to after `.resume`).
You need something to kick it off though. The simplest way is probably to use `(@resumer || @code).call`.
memoization, basically remember the results of methods that have a particular parameter values. so it does not actually execute the method it retrieves the remembered value
1. They know that a lot of subscribers have abandoned the service and probably won't pay again, but they don't want to have to report that the number of users is declining once those subscriptions start to expire.
2. Acquiring new customers is not happening fast enough to keep critical mass or grow.
This move is to address those two problems. I also think it's a negative signal for the future of the company because I don't think a limited free account will get people to join. While they make clear that they are not a Twitter clone, the concept of following people is a Twitter concept, and you don't have those same limitations on a Twitter free account.
There's something in general that bothers me about App.net. In my career I've found that software engineers rarely are able to climb the org chart like business people are. The reason I've found is that engineers in general have a certain disdain for schmoozing and company politics, so they try to isolate themselves from it. App.net's marketing pitch I feel appeals to that isolationist desire and that's part of the reason it was such a hit.