Earlier this month, founder Dalton Caldwell told me that people won’t adopt a new social network just because it’s good for them — it needed to be “truly better.” That’s probably true.

But free is also good.

Caldwell started App.net as a counterpoint to free social networks like Facebook and Twitter. His goal was to create a social space online that isn’t beholden to advertisers. Now, after six months as a paid site, gaining more than 30,000 members who pay $36 a year each, and building a thriving community on a web client App.net never expected to build, the service is poised to vastly expand its reach by adding a free tier. There is a catch, however.

To preserve the close-knit App.net sense of community, you need to be invited by an existing member. And there are a few limits on free accounts, App.net’s marketing manager Ben Friedland told me.

People with a free account will only be able to follow 40 people, will only have 500 megabytes of free file storage, and can only upload files with a maximum size of 10 megabytes. (Paid accounts can follow an unlimited number of users, get 10GB of included storage, and can upload 100 MB files.)

“As a bonus, members can earn even more file storage by inviting friends,” Friedland added.

Both the invited and inviting member will get 100 MB of extra storage if the invited member follows five people and authorizes at least one third-party app. Members can earn up to 2GB of extra storage this way.

This is big news for the social network, and it has the real potential to make it take off and grow quickly. Not to Facebook or Twitter size, but certainly 10 or even 100 times larger than it currently is.

“App.net has never been about the numbers,” Brian Solis, Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, told me this morning. “I think this is an experiment in curated growth, much like Quora did.”

A quick poll of my Twitter followers found that some who haven’t yet taken the plunge now would, if it was free. When asked if he would join App.net if it was free, photographer @AlanBailward said “Yes, probably.” And software developer @CurtisMcHale said the fact that App.net isn’t just purely free is a plus for him:

“I think the appeal is that it’s got a business model.”

Three weeks ago when I chatted with App.net’s Caldwell, he said he felt that due to recent API spats between Twitter and Instagram, people were started to “get it.” In other words, people are starting to understand why a social network that is beholden to its users, not its advertisers, is a good thing.

Now we’ll see, won’t we?

photo credit: Yodel Anecdotal via photopin cc

As crazy as a pay-for-access social network might sound in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it’s not without precedent. The Well was essentially the first social network, and it was expensive for people to access.

But the key, for Caldwell, is quality.

“I don’t believe that massive numbers of people will adopt something just because it’s good for them,” Caldwell told me yesterday. “To become mainstream, it must become truly better — MySpace was better than Friendster, and Facebook was better than MySpace.”

Not that huge numbers are the goal for App.net. Caldwell’s initial goal for the beholden-to-users-not-advertisers social glue that became App.net was a mere 10,000 users. App.net has already tripled that, and it recently reduced prices from $50 to $36 a year due to economies of scale.

Rather, the goal was freedom.

Freedom for subscribers, who would be the customers and not the product of a social network for perhaps the first time since The Well. And freedom for developers, who would not be at the mercy of a service that owed its capability to meet payroll to advertisers’ capability to make a buck, and therefore to their ability to package and sell users’ attention.

“In my first blog post [about app.net] I said I believed that the social API backends of Twitter and Facebook were really useful to developers, but unfortunately, they’re getting locked down,” Dalton says. “It’s not like the people running the companies are dumb or bad, but they have a business model that forces them to control the stream.”

Which means that that Facebook and Twitter — and any other social network that depends on ad revenue — have a financial incentive to “hose their developers” over and over again. The recent API dustup between Instagram and Twitter that resulted in Instagram photos being banned from the Twitter stream is just one example.

“All the things I’ve been writing about have been coming true,” Caldwell says.

Which is one reason why App.net recently introduced its new file API, which is essentially the building blocks for having your own private cloud without having to own any hardware. With the new API, if a Flickr user wanted to join 500px instead, she could simply import her photos from Flickr and pick up right where she left off at 500px. If — and here’s the massive caveat — both services supported the new API.

That caveat is one reason it makes perfect sense that in conversation, Caldwell still refers to his 6-month-old baby as “an experiment.” It’s a social experiment as much as it is a technological experiment, if not more so. The original idea was to only create a social API backend — a backend for literally almost everything that could be social online — and let developers play with it, build on it, all in a spirit of freedom and openness. User-centricity plus developer-friendly.

“Originally we weren’t even going to have a client ourselves … we didn’t want to build a client for it,” Caldwell said.

Eventually App.net did build a web client, more as a proof of concept than anything else, but Caldwell is more interested in what other developers are doing.

Source: App.net

Patter on App.net

Such as a new client for App.net called Patter which, Caldwell says, looks nothing like microblogging or even Facebook. In fact, it looks like AOL chat rooms, with different topics and rooms you can go into. In other words, nothing like anyone from App.net would have built.

“That’s exactly the point,” Caldwell says. “Stuff that we would never have expected ourselves.”

Whether App.net is a successful experiment or not is still an open question. Early returns are positive, but 30,000 users in a world with billion-user social networks is clearly a blip on the radar. It’ll be interesting to whether that blip is the tip of an iceberg, or just a rowboat tossed in the waves.

App.net, however, has two things going for it.

One is its developing community, who care enough about the service — and what it stands for — to pony up cash for something others think they’re getting for free elsewhere. These are the power users that are spending time on App.net’s fledgling front-end, building relationships and engaging in richer, deeper conversations than they’re finding elsewhere.

The other is that, as sociologist Margaret Mead said, “a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

And Caldwell has a plan for that small, committed group to grow at a much faster rate. But that’s a story for another day.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

As far as user milestones go, 20,000 is usually nothing to boast about. But for App.net, a nascent for-charge social platform, the modest achievement means the company can reduce its prices.

App.net is a Twitter-like social network where consumers pay to post in an ad-free environment. It’s also a framework that allows developers to not only build applications as they see fit but also make some moolah in the process. The service launched in beta two months ago following a successful Kickstarter-style funding campaign.

“The membership of App.net is just about to cross the 20,000 user level, which creates some economies of scale for us,” founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell penned in a blog post. “Because of this momentum and scale, we’ve decided to introduce a couple of updates to our pricing model.”

From here on out, App.net members can opt to pay $5 per month or $36 a year. Previously, the startup offered one member-tier plan that cost $50 per year. Members who paid the $50 free are being gifted a few additional months of service.

Unfortunately for App.net developers, who pay $100 per year to build applications, the discounts aren’t open to them. Last week, however, the company rolled out a developer incentive program to begin rewarding the best app-markers with cash for their machinations.

There are currently 10 App.net iOS apps, three Android applications, one Windows Phone app, four Mac desktop clients, and several browser plugins, Caldwell said.

Photo credit: timparkinson/Flickr

Two months into an experiment that caters to the ideals of developers and consumers alike, the social platform App.net has revealed the particulars of how it plans to create incentives for the creation of top-notch applications.

App.net is a social network and framework that borrows the concept of the status update but uses it for good, its creator Dalton Caldwell claims. On App.net, people pay an annual fee of $50 for the right to post, and developers purchase the rights to create apps. App.net encourages both audiences to cultivate networks and experiences free of the ravaging effects of noisy, data-hungry advertisers. The philosophy is in direct opposition to the ad-based, occasionally developer-hostile models employed Twitter and Facebook.

Thursday, the startup, which is backed by its believers, shared more of its plan for fostering a superior platform by introducing a developer incentive program that rewards app-makers with cash — at least $20,000 each month — for making apps that people love.

“We have spent a lot of time thinking about how to create a system that actually incents the creation of innovative, imaginative, and useful apps,” Caldwell said in a blog post. “With this in mind, we are implementing a system that is driven by direct feedback from members.”

The program, which commences October 1, will include an email survey sent to users each month. The survey will ask users to rate each of the applications they use, and App.net will use the ratings to generate a score for each app. An application’s score will also factor in usage statistics.

Participation in the program is optional for developers, but those that opt-in will be eligible for a percentage of the incentive pool should they score high enough.

“By way of example and not in limitation of the foregoing, if the combined score for all Applications in the Incentive Program is 100, the Incentive Payment for an Approved Developer with an Application score of 10 would equal $2,000 (or, 10/100 x $20,000),” the program documentation explains.

Caldwell, who would did not share the number of active App.net users, highlighted the early success of the platform and cited the growing collection of applications, in statement made to VentureBeat.

“Having a great suite of apps is our biggest priority,” he said. “That is why we are doing this initiative.”

Emerald city photo via Shutterstock

The new social utility that serial entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell started in response to being, in his words, screwed by Facebook, is live. App.net, which Caldwell ran a Kickstarter-ish campaign to fund, blew through its $500,000 goal and currently sits at $595,150.

And counting, with 31 hours left.

Caldwell announced the success on his own site, taking pains to state that third-party verification of the funding process will follow. App.net’s home page has the current results: 8,894 backers who contributed the almost $600,000, including 58 who signed up for the Pro tier at $1,000, which includes developer access, phone support, and a personal meeting with Caldwell.

App.net is a different kind of social platform, as Caldwell is fond of saying. Users can’t join for free; they pay $50/year for the privilege. Like Twitter, users post status updates and follow friends and contacts. But they get a generous 256 characters instead of Twitter’s more parsimonious 140. And the social network itself, the place where all the connection happens, is not the point. Rather, the point is services built on top of the system.

Oh, and there’s no advertising.

In other words, if you remember that Mark Zuckerberg used to talk about Facebook as a “social utility,” Caldwell is really serious about simply providing electricity, or water, or maybe, more aptly, a dial tone. Most of the cool stuff with bells and whistles and cute puppies in pink will come from the apps that developers build on top of the infrastructure.

Hence the name: App.net. Not very sexy, not very friendly, and not something that reeks of Next Cool Thing for Consumers, exactly. But very developer-friendly, and very protective of consumer/user rights.

The service is already in alpha, and has received a positive nod from John Gruber. Others appreciate the chutzpah but doubt the odds.

Personally, I think the odds are high that App.net will be the next Diaspora. But it also has a good chance of being the exclusive private social network for the digerati.

Image credit: Harris Shiffman/ShutterStock

A select bunch of social media idealists are now taking up residence at App.net, the would-be status update safe house for consumers running away from advertisers and developers seeking refuge from hostile platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

App.net, which makes its alpha debut today, is the social paradise entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell dreamed up after getting burned by Facebook.

The network charges its members $50 for rent in exchange for freedom and trust. The only caveat is that enough people have to financially back the cause if App.net is to exist. The project needs to raise $500,000 from supporters by August 13 should it wish to live on for at least a year. As of this afternoon, close to 2,000 people have pledged a total of $154,400, which means Caldwell and team have just 10 days to rally the troops.

Friday’s early release is an alpha one, and the consumer-facing web app will certainly disappoint the person who expects a better Twitter on day one. But the release has been purposefully timed to give early backers and supporters more than a little glimpse at the platform.

For Caldwell, it’s both an opportunity to prove that his platform is anything but vaporware — an accusation thrown around by disbelievers — and a way to stimulate excitement around the social experience. The latter is clearly the case, at least on App.net, where early users are praising Caldwell en masse and gushing about the platform’s potential.

The product itself echoes the simplicity of Twitter’s status update network with streams, follow buttons, profiles, mentions, and so forth. It also gives members a tad more space in the form of 256 characters to opine as they see fit. The network is lacking in several features, including avatars, cover photos or backgrounds, a way to tell when you’ve been followed, notifications, photo uploads, or anything fancy or flashy. That’s partially the point.

App.net the web app is really just a proof of concept, Caldwell explained to me earlier this week. The real dream is that developers take the API, which already exists, and create the fun tools that make this communication channel useful. Mobile applications, desktop clients, product clones repurposed for other uses, Caldwell wants it all. He doesn’t care that he won’t get to own the experience. In fact, he’d prefer it that way.

The service, however, won’t stay alpha forever. Caldwell has plans to push out updates rapidly and make fixes to the interface and add new URLs later today, he told me. The service is opening up to just a small group of people today. All backers will get access at a later date.

What App.net lacks in features it more than makes for in spirit. It’s as if Caldwell has pushed the reset button on Twitter and gone back in time to rewrite history, this time attempting to ensure that people feel safe and developers who take up residence aren’t thrown out on the street.

Photo credit: Vicki France/Shutterstock

A controversial open letter directed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left another Marc in quite the pickle yesterday.

In a note entitled “Dear Mark Zuckerberg,” Dalton Caldwell, the serial founder now behind social utopia App.net, publicly chastised Facebook for negotiating in bad form and accused the company of threatening to destroy his business after first promising safe harbor.

The strongly worded letter was circulated heavily on Twitter and Hacker News, and quickly became a problem for Marc Andreessen, the founding partner of venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, aka A16Z, who maintains a board seat with both Facebook and Caldwell’s company.

Caught in the middle, Andreessen has decided to step down as a board member of Caldwell’s startup Mixed Media Labs (or App.net), as first reported by AllThingsD. A16Z partner Scott Weiss will take Andreessen’s place and assume the Mixed Media Labs board seat for the famous venture capital firm, Caldwell confirmed to VentureBeat.

Caldwell said that he expected as much to happen as a result of publishing the damning diatribe.

“Andreessen Horowitz has, and continues to be, completely supportive of me as an entrepreneur,” Caldwell said. “This move was not unexpected. Scott Weiss is now on my board and I am looking forward to working with him.”

This isn’t the first time the firm’s stake in Mixed Media Labs has made for an awkward situation. Andreessen Horowitz chose to bet on Mixed Media Labs, then focusing on developing photo-sharing app Picplz, instead of re-upping in Instagram. That turned out to be a decision that, while principled, cost the firm millions in proceeds.

Photo credit: TechShowNetwork/Flickr

Developers’ biggest complaint about Google+ is that the social service does not have a full write API, meaning that no tools can be written to add data to Google+ … only to pull data out.

(At least, not a public API — select companies such as Hootsuite have been granted access to publish to Google+.)

Source: Google

Part of Google+ API documentation … lots of gets, no puts

Yesterday, Google senior VP of engineering Vic Gundotra noticed that Facebook was taking heat from a developer who is building a competing service to Facebook: Dalton Caldwell. Yes, the same Dalton Caldwell who is now running a $500,000 KickStarter project to replace all current social networks with App.net. (Good luck with that, by the way.)

Caldwell’s previous project, a friend-discovery app that used Facebook to find acquaintances, was essentially shut down by Facebook, mostly due to changes in Facebook’s business model and API. Those changes relate, Caldwell says, to Facebook’s need for more revenue.

It’s not unfamiliar … it’s part of the same progression that Twitter is possibly maybe probably going through right now: utility to media company. Control the community -> control the content -> control the product -> control the advertisers -> control the cash.

Source: Google+

Vic Gundotra

Gundotra was quick to take advantage of the opportunity to skewer Facebook … and present Google+ as a better option, eventually:

I’m not interested in screwing over developers. When we open an API, we want developers to feel confident that the innovations they build are going to be long lasting. Releasing an API and then later changing the rules of the game isn’t fun for anyone, especially developers who’ve spent their life’s energies building on the platform.

So that is why, more than a year after the initial launch of Google+, Google still has not released a full public API. It’s all about developers, and their life energies!

But, Gundotra hints, one is eventually coming:

So I’m sorry that we haven’t released a wide open write API for those of you who want one. We’re being careful because we want to be different. You know, actually respectful of developers who build on our platform. It’s novel. I know.

The developer community waits, no doubt with baited breath.

Image credit: Gary Blakeley/ShutterStock

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