Your page copy and the first few minutes of your video that I could sit through just tell me you are nerd raging over advertising on the internet. I get that you want to do something differently, but WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU BUILDING?
What am I becoming a "member" of? What am I funding? App.net appears to be a way to get more installs of mobile apps. What the hell?
There is a FAQ entry that attempts to address the question "OK, great, but what exactly is this product you will be delivering?" Are you unsatisfied with our answer in the FAQ?
UPDATE
I appreciate and agree with the feedback that we could explained things earlier and more clearly. Updates to our page coming soon.
Nth'ing the "I don't know what this is" crowd. To the majority of the population, "Twitter before it became a media company" is still just today's Twitter. Most people don't care about ads, unfortunately, and only a relatively tiny group of developers care about the growing restrictions.
Take off the developer hat for a moment; how would App.net improve my life? I read a great piece of marketing advice recently: in one sentence, create a problem, then tell me how your product solves it.
I am appealing to developers because I think they are the intended audience. I only think that is the most important experimental test.
From my personal blog post:
"Although Paul Graham is specifically describing a hypothetical new search engine rather than a new realtime feed service/API in this inspiring blogpost, his assertions about the power of 10,000 committed users are highly relevant:
The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that size.
Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."
I appreciate the need for vagueness in your answer to the question of "What exactly are you building?" I'm sure in many ways you and your team don't know exactly how it's going to grow and change, and I for one would rather have the team making this thing be flexible and reactive as opposed to building to a spec that was promised to customers.
I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.
Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.
Hey Dalton & crew – congrats on this launch. I think that technologically, it's mostly clear what you want to build, but the thing that might be confusing is just that it is only described as "a real-time feed and API." Although you mention it's "Twitter-like," there still feels like there's some ambiguity in what type of content this feed is used for, especially since it's a paid service with the name App.net. For example, I don't know if I'm signing up to have a new social service, or a service that I'll mostly utilize in conjunction with app development, etc.
It took me 15 minutes to understand what "feed" means, which then lead me to understand what "social service" means. I think you intro paragraph could be clarified by replacing the word "service" with "platform". I know this isn't strictly true, but it's clearer to distinguish between platforms, which are for developers and services, which are for users. Try this:
"We're building a real-time platform that allows developers to create social services where users come first, not advertisers.
Our team has spent the last 9 years building social services, developer platforms, mobile applications and more.
We believe that advertising-supported platforms are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done.
I think this is a marvellous idea, and I'm now an official backer. One thing that I'm worried about is that a "pay wall" sort of model might prevent casual users from signing up. Maybe a paid API / developer model might work better.
For instance, the vast majority of GitHub users don't pay a dime, since they only use open source projects (which are free to host). There are many people/companies that use the paid service (mine included), but we pay for the "added feature" of being able to keep the repo private.
I can't put my finger on it, but something feels unbalanced. So, are paid users simply paying for the ability to post private updates? Or are they paying for access to other users' private updates?
I agree, I watched the video and read the FAQ and I'm still not 100% sure what you're building.
Edit: I hadn't read your original post at http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been. I just read it and now it makes sense. I have a feeling your video will reach a much wider audience, so others might feel lost as well.
The pricing feels off to me if this is to penetrate the mass market.
While it might seem 'right' to us, who understand the effort this requires and appreciate the value it provides, especially over an ad funded service, $50/year just doesn't seem like it would appeal to the general public.
I suspect that even many of the savvy folks here would not lay out $50/yr for Twitter or Facebook if either were to switch to a directly funded model, and they have the advantage that they already have big networks.
I have no scientific basis to this, but I feel like for this to be a success, 99 cents a month, or $10/year, would be a price point to shoot for. I have no idea if it's plausible to run something like this at that price.
[I know, I sell a $10 iPhone app, so I perhaps am not the best person to make this comment...]
The video should start @ 3:00 exactly. It's a great pitch and gets me interested, THEN I'll listen to why you're building it, not the other way around.
"I've been inspired to build exactly the service that I want manifested. And that service is called App.net and this video is announcing this project... what is actually is is a real time feed and API, and rather than being a free and add supported service with no clear business model, we are actually going to be paid, and the reason I am so optimistic with a paid opportunity is that it aligns the incentives... etc. etc"
dalton, i saw a dear friend support you over my twitter and I clicked but have NO IDEA what this does? Seriously, I am pretty internet savvy but all I read was "feed platform" and how you weren't going to sell my data-- but what data? What is it? you might want to update the landing page a bit :)
Why aren't you offering an incentive to early backers? I can't see any reason to donate now, or within the 30 days, rather than wait and see how things develop.
The best incentive we currently have is the username claiming process. If/when project succeeds unclaimed usernames will be available to backers in the order that people backed.
What other incentives would you suggest? Happy to take suggestions. Today is the "announcement" phase, we are going to be collaborating w/interested folks and fleshing things out considerably more over the next month.
(p.s. I have been awake for far too many hours, so I am not sure I can effectively keep replying to everyone at the moment)
Kickstarter's limited rewards serve this purpose: discounted first year subscriptions, tote bags, stickers - the usual. It's a common strategy because initial momentum is so crucial for crowdfunding efforts.
You want to attract developers. XYZ number of free API calls for your app is simplest and effective way to attract developers, if I understood your proposal.
I wrote a blogpost about my thinking behind this here: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal