Some Thoughts on App.net
A few weeks ago Dalton Caldwell, founder of imeem and Picplz, wrote a well received blog post titled What Twitter could have been where he laments the fact that Twitter hasn't fulfilled some of the early promise developers saw in it as a platform. Specifically he writes
Context & Ripple Effects
The backdrop is Twitter's own July: within a week it cut off tweet syndication to LinkedIn, reiterated a crackdown on API terms in a move toward a walled garden, and pushed expanded tweets through its official iPhone and Android apps while shipping a Nokia Series 40 client for developing markets. Dalton Caldwell's widely read 'What Twitter could have been' gave voice to the developers who feel that promise being withdrawn, and Dare Obasanjo's post is an analyst's response to it.
The argument clearly struck a nerve: the same-day pickup runs from Fred Wilson's 'In Defense Of Free' on A VC to Dave Winer and Howard Lindzon, splitting the tech blogosphere between those who see a paid, developer-first feed as the fix and those who defend the free, ad-funded model Twitter chose.
First-order effects
- Developers building clients and services on Twitter's API face tightened terms immediately after the LinkedIn cutoff, forcing them to weigh how much of their business sits on a platform they don't control.
- App.net gets its strongest hearing yet: Caldwell's critique functions as positioning for a paid alternative pitched at exactly the developers Twitter is squeezing out.
Second-order effects
- The rebuttal from investors like Fred Wilson forces the pro-App.net camp to answer the hard question directly — whether enough users will pay a subscription for something comparable networks give away free.
- Other platforms and client makers watch the experiment before committing resources: if paying users materialize, expect imitators; if not, the walled-garden path looks validated.
Third-order effects
- If ad-funded platforms keep restricting API access, social infrastructure could bifurcate into large closed consumer networks alongside smaller user-paid services aimed at developers and power users.
- Platform risk becomes a first-class criterion for startups deciding where to build, shifting leverage in the developer-platform bargain back toward whoever owns the customer relationship.
The trend: As ad-funded platforms tighten API access, developer disillusionment is driving experimentation with user-paid social networks as an alternative funding model.