noelsequeira

This is an intriguing idea, but I see two fundamental problems:

1) Isolation through cliques can be a bit of a double-edged sword. While the prospect of being able to battle spam (and a wave of unsolicited mentions) is probably immensely appealing to the 1%, altering the fundamental contract on which the protocol is based is almost always a bad idea.

2) Even if this accounts for a non-trivial fraction of overall revenue, they aren't going to stop pursuing advertising dollars. Which means that they still need to own the stream. And that the third party client massacre will, therefore, continue unabated.

I'm not going to prognosticate about whether or not this service will take off. I really hope it does - the raison d'être seems genuine, or at the very least, passionately backed.

But that seems to be the very problem with it. In trying not to bury his lead, I believe Dalton Caldwell has let it take over the pitch. 95% "why" and 5% "what". 10 minutes in, I was still scratching my head wondering what the service will look like. And the name App.net certainly doesn't do the cause any favours. The first decent explanation finds itself relegated to question 2 of the FAQs.

This is an audacious attempt, and I laud that. But the pitch, in my opinion, needs an overhaul. Diaspora was also about the "why", but they addressed the "what" really early in their Kickstarter pitch.

I believe this advice applies to specific businesses / opportunities (most of them likely B2B).

B2C apps, especially those that rely on network effects to grow (Instapaper, Gumroad, Buffer) would do well to shrug off any concerns about clones, and continue to do what they do best: iterate on product and get more visiblity.

And while Instapaper and Gumroad might not have shared a detailed analysis of their journey in the "How I made $X in Y days on platform Z" format, their ability to succeed is in some ways tied to their perception as a successful business. In Instapaper's case, as a user, I'm building a repository of articles, and I wouldn't invest any effort if I felt the service wouldn't be around in a few months. A similar argument might be made for Gumroad - as a "paywall for everything", it just can't afford to seem small-and-under-the-radar, something that could easily be misconstrued as fly-by-night.