There have been plenty of worries about the direction Twitter is heading lately. I’m not just referring to their attempts to monetize the service and the fear of sponsored ads and tweets directly in your stream. Hell, in a few months you might be wishing that was the least of the problems for this service. What I’m referring to is guidance that was set forth by Twitter months ago that developers “reproducing the mainstream Twitter client experience” simply shouldn’t. This was reinforced with a new set of rules today (no longer guidelines) on the use of their API and the writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer. As a visual guide they explain the current ecosystem of Twitter apps using this graph:
Twitter explained that they have no problem with any application that happens to fall in the top left, or lower left and right quadrants. And yet here’s the problem: Twitter doesn’t seem to understand that most people like their service because of an app that falls in that top right quadrant. Tweetdeck (had it not been bought by Twitter), Tweetbot, Storify, Echofon, they all are at risk with these new API requirements and the strong words from Twitter about their continued existence. It says a lot about a company that applications that are geared towards consumer engagement are discouraged in favor of applications that help businesses collect analytical data.
Dovetailing with this recent set of news is the successful funding of app.net which is billing itself as an alternative to Twitter that focuses on the user, not the advertiser. However in order to do that they charge a fee of $50 for a regular user and $100 for a developer (both an annual cost). They raised over $700,000 so clearly there is quite a bit of traction there, however plenty have voiced concerns about the fact that there are so many white males representative of the “community” and that such a high fee creates a “Country Club” atmosphere where only the privileged get to be engaged. Anil Dash has a great post that talks about why app.net in its current state is problematic.
It should also be noted that there’s nothing revolutionary about something like app.net superseding Twitter. Without a free offering, a service like app.net can’t gain the traction of a large enough number of users to be of value for a social network (I can’t justify the cost because most people I interact with are not there). And as D’arcy notes, in the end we’re handing our data off from one silo to another.
I don’t pretend to know what the answer is. Perhaps there will be a mass exodus from Twitter (if they truly have the balls to outlaw all popular third party clients this is a real possibility). Perhaps app.net will rise to become a formidable opponent. Perhaps nothing will change. Right now it feels like the goals of users and consumers in these spaces are absolutely at odds with the goals of the companies that run them. It’s problematic on many levels and I hope we see some resolution in the next few months.
Now, before we go off with our pitchforks and torches to kill the beast, let me remind you that anything anyone says about App.net being the “future of social networking” is highly speculative and probably wrong. M.G. Siegler said it better here than I could: it won’t scale to Twitter size. Let me further remind you that social networking is not a necessity (it does confer certain advantages, none of which are present in App.net and absent in Twitter). The point is, Twitter isn’t going anywhere. This isn’t Jim Crow and people aren’t being denied their rights. Which brings me to my next point:
Anil Dash and the authors of the articles he cites are full of shit.
I actually happened across the phrase “white flight from Facebook and Twitter,” which couldn’t be a worse metaphor (Information Superhighway, anyone?). Nobody is leaving Facebook and Twitter to get away from all the black people. (For that matter, I doubt many of them are *leaving* Twitter at all.) Nobody is joining App.net for the promise of not being around black people. The metaphor is bad, and what’s worse – it injects the stigma of racism into an argument in which it has exactly no place. I can almost imagine Whitney Erin Boesel sitting at her desk and trying to figure out how best to demonize this group of early adopters who have committed no crime except being white and male. Well, the standard argument always works: they must be racist, sexist, classist bastards. People made the same comments when the Internet and computing were taking off (I imagine some of the dustier ones are still talking about it), but they’re just as wrong.
That’s a fair point. I don’t necessarily agree that what might or might not be happening with the signups at app.net is racist, rather I think the structure of the network currently *encourages* a network of people (mostly geeks) with discretionary income, which will be primarily middle to upper middle class white men. App.net can change that and I think they likely will once they’re out of this alpha period (after all Flickr charges for accounts and no one is up in arms about them). A free regular account with a limited set of features and a “member” account with full access in return for supporting an ad-free network is something I could get behind.
For what it’s worth I just signed up for app.net. I’ll likely have a post here soon about why I did that.
Here’s something from Dalton Caldwell himself about why more is not always better and some of the motivation for App.net.
I still don’t agree that it’s App.net itself that’s encouraging just white middle-class men, although they are of course right that that’s who’s adopting early. The website is of course there for anyone to stumble upon, but it’s spreading around in mostly tech circles (on the other hand, did you catch Stephen Fry’s tweet?) – for now. These circles are overwhelmingly white and male, but it’s early days. Dash’s suggestion of reaching out to some token minorities is wrongheaded because it’s so artificial. Networks don’t grow by fiat, they are what they are. It will happen in its own time or App.net will become a ghost town in its own time.
I can’t justify spending upwards of $50 on something like App.net just yet, but I don’t feel left out in the cold. I’m interested to read about your motivation, as you mentioned earlier that there’s no one you really interact with on it yet.
[...] might be obvious by my last post, I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter (and subsequently App.net) in the last few days. With [...]