<story><title>Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware</title><url>http://daltoncaldwell.com/appnet-is-not-vaporware</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxwin</author><text>I think it&apos;s going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyone else, a social network with ads (that are not TOO annoying) is much better than one that ask for your money. He might be able to find enough people to pay to become a profitable business but I doubt he will ever reach facebook or twitter like scale. And if it doesn&apos;t scale, the paying members will leave eventually.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghshephard</author><text>I listen to the podcasts of precisely six people .  Four of those six people have already voiced support for join.app.net ((Dan Benjamin, John Grueber, Marco Armenti, John Siracusa).  I expect the other two would join fairly quickly, and, given the &quot;open&quot; nature of join.app.net, I expect anybody who wanted cross-posting from twitter over to join.app.net, wouldn&apos;t have much difficulty.    Just have the client post on both locations (much like Path posts to both Path and Facebook)&lt;p&gt;I really only want about a dozen people on Join.App.Net, and most of them are already there.  So, for _me_ it just has to scale to twelve people - it just needs to be the &lt;i&gt;right&lt;/i&gt; twelve people - and so far it looks good.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dalton Caldwell: App.net is not Vaporware</title><url>http://daltoncaldwell.com/appnet-is-not-vaporware</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxwin</author><text>I think it&apos;s going to be very hard to pull this off. I feel like Dalton is living in a bubble of people who are willing to pay to avoid ads. But for most everyone else, a social network with ads (that are not TOO annoying) is much better than one that ask for your money. He might be able to find enough people to pay to become a profitable business but I doubt he will ever reach facebook or twitter like scale. And if it doesn&apos;t scale, the paying members will leave eventually.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelbuckbee</author><text>I agree with your analysis, but it&apos;s worth noting that size/scale aren&apos;t everything. Hacker News isn&apos;t the size of Reddit (or Digg at its height) and I&apos;m kind of glad about that.&lt;p&gt;If App.Net ends up being the &apos;Hacker News Twitterlike&apos; service, is that a success or failure?</text></comment>