App.net is an ambitious experiment to create a for-profit “social infrastructure” system for the Internet: you could use it to build something like Twitter, or a file syncing or storage service, or a notification service. In practice the only one that got any attention, about a year ago, was App.net’s vision of a better Twitter. This came shortly after it became clear that Twitter had decided it was in their own best interest to knife their development community.
Yet like it or not they’re still competing against Twitter, and Twitter is “free.” (The air quotes are important.) App.net started out at a price of $50 a year, then dropped to $36, then added a free tier of deliberately minimal utility. $36/year isn’t an outrageous fee, but it’s infinitely higher than free. It’s too high to even be a credible impulse buy.
Even if you didn’t see the stories yesterday you can write the next part. App.net discovered this model isn’t working well after all, and they’re keeping the service open but laying off everyone. This seemingly crazy move may work, but it reduces App.net to a side project.
Maybe App.net needed cheaper pricing, or maybe it just couldn’t work competing with “free” no matter what. Maybe focusing on the kinds of people who give a poop about Twitter’s relationship to its development community wasn’t the right tack. Maybe its problem is that it was a private haven for rich white tech dudes, as some critics snarked.
Maybe, although I’ll admit the last one grates on me. We’re mocking App.net for having a cover charge–the only legitimate beef, as there’s no evidence they discriminate based on gender, ethnicity or bank statements–then going on to the huge club down the street, the one with ads on every available bit of wall, because they give us cheap beer for free.
But maybe App.net has misdiagnosed the problem.
What’s Twitter’s functionality? Broadcast notifications sent to people who specifically subscribe to them, with simple mechanisms for setting them private or public (i.e., direct messaging) and replying. That mechanism can act as text messaging, group chat, link sharing, image sharing, status updates, site update notifications, news alerts, and more. It’s a terrific concept.
App.net’s best insight was that making notifications “infrastructure” the way email and HTTP are has amazing potential. Twitter has no interest in letting other people use their infrastructure except under the strictest terms. That’s the problem App.net’s model solves. Good for them.
But as much as this is anathema to the Valley’s technolibertarian mindset, infrastructure only works as a common good. Suppose CERN had spun off WebCorp to monetize HTTP. They could offer “free” web with tightly dictated terms on how we interact with their ecosystem, or they could be liberal with those terms and exact a connection toll. But neither of those scenarios would get us to where we are now. The Internet is the Internet because it’s built on protocols that are free. Not free-with-air-quotes, just free period.
“Wait, but if there was free infrastructure to do what Twitter does, how would anyone make money?” At first, by selling commercial clients and servers, although that market would be likely to decline over time. Some companies could run commercial notification networks with access charges to operators. (This vision needs a decentralized network like email to spread operational costs out as broadly as possible, but that network must deliver notifications in fairly close to real time and in the proper order, which is a huge problem.)
In the long run, broadcast notification services only survive if they do become like email services. App.net isn’t making enough money to sustain a full-time business, but so far Twitter isn’t either. They both believe the value is in the infrastructure, and they’re both wrong. The value comes from making the infrastructure free.
Meanwhile, I find the bits of schadenfreude I’m seeing on this–not the “I didn’t expect this to work and I’m disappointed I was right” posts, but the “ha ha, private club goes under” posts–to be a little disheartening. I like free beer, too, but the managers at Club Tweet are starting to look a bit desperate.