[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or months now I've been hearing nonstop talk of App.net, the "different kind of social platform". If you haven't heard anything about it, I'm not surprised. While the service has been backed by many major figures in the technology industry, including John Gruber and Peter Rojas, word of its existence hasn't reached every Internet dweller. But if you've been following the ongoing Twitter controversy, this new social platform is probably on the top of your list of ways to connect with friends.

As I recanted my thoughts on App.net I noticed that they were most inconclusive. I'd not yet decided whether to support or reject the potential it has. Now, however, I'd like to take a deeper look at how things are to be run at this recently established network.

App.net's promise

At the very start, App.net was an idea more than a true product. Crowdsourced through Kickstarter using its own website instead of the startup project's, this plan gradually gathered the pledges of many; it met its goal on August 11th, approximately 38 hours before the deadline. After that, the project's founder, Dalton Caldwell, initiated development on this vast effort to improve the way you socialize using the Internet.

Like every new social platform that's been attempting to earn new users in the past year, App.net hopes to obtain your trust by assuring that it will "never sell your personal data, content, feed, interests, clicks, or anything else to advertisers." That sounds great to me, but will the end user actually believe this? After all the bad press Facebook has gotten over the years for its alleged selling of information to third-party corporations, why would you want to believe this? I often wonder if people have lost all trust in humanity due to this sort of stuff. Is there any way of knowing whether you can trust something or should you just take that leap of faith like they're asking you to? These are plausible questions.

Our most valuable asset is your trust.

Many people have become so cynical about user-hostile, privacy-violating social services that they refuse to participate at all. We can understand why. Earning your trust is the most important thing we can do. It won't be easy, and we will make some mistakes, but we will do our best to be honest and transparent.
You can't blame the users for being scared. Even a statement like that isn't going to help you get trusting users as easy as you think. I personally trust the folks at App.net, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pay them to use their service. There's a big difference between the two.

Pricing

Now we've reached the one reason I won't join App.net. It's a perfectly understandable cause and no one should argue my point. Investing is always risky, but with this you do have the one promise: you will receive access to a product that's substantially better than any of the alternatives out there and will always stay that way. But that's just the tip of the iceberg here since a one-year membership to App.net currently costs $50 for a user and $100 for a developer. The two-tier approach is nice, but what if they decide to raise the prices annually? I talked to a spokesperson from the network and he said, "We are not going to raise prices. Dropping pricing is a possibility, if we reach scale, but we have no immediate plans to change pricing as of now." I'm certainly glad to hear that if anything they'll be reducing the yearly fee.

The same spokesperson told me that there will not be a free access option to App.net "as of now". "Users will be able to subscribe to public content through RSS feeds and we're enabling those protocols, and that will be free," he further noted. The representative reminded that there is read-only access to the network, but users must pay to participate. This is disappointing to me, but I understand the reasoning behind it: the network is supported by users and always will be.

I think that paying for a truly genuine service is a good thing, but something like this is reliant on more than just the service itself. The users make up a big part of how you'll like what you purchase here. App.net isn't something like a magazine subscription or guitar lessons, which you can enjoy no matter what -- this, of course, depends on whether you choose to or not. Instead, the service is like a night club which you can be admitted to only by tipping the bouncer a hefty fee.

You could turn things around though; why not use cable TV or services like Netflix as an argument for this? Why yes, you do pay to watch copyrighted content. That does make sense -- and it's an invalid argument. You pay for something that you could get free, yes, but there's an issue: the free version of media like that found on the aforementioned sources is illegally obtained. When you think about socializing, well, that's priceless. You can choose to pay a price if you want, but why? To be different from the people you so ignorantly oppose? To show that you can enjoy your online social activity in an ad-free manner, unlike users of Facebook? Or is it just because you see the products potential? Many do and that's a good thing, but time is going to tell whether the longterm investment of even just a year is worthwhile.

Acquisitions

What if App.net is sold to a larger corporation like Facebook? Okay, maybe the CEO is obstinate, but that doesn't mean he will turn down a $1 billion offer from the largest social network in the world. If this happens, which it likely will (even if it's not Facebook), how are you to trust the service then? This is all hypothetical, but there's always a threat of hacking, of a third-party getting their hands on your personal information, of identity theft. It happens: this is the digital world and you can't protect yourself forever.

I asked a relations expert for the network whether or not it would sell if the price and terms were correct. He simply reminded me to take a look at the App.net terms of service, specifically detailing that users are important to the network. However, the spokesperson did not answer my original question of whether or not user's information would be included in the sale. "We have no plans to sell our company, although as anyone knows things happen in business, but a reasonable read through our terms of service further demonstrates how important our user trust is." I'm not sure if this is a good way to run a business of this sort. Users who have paid the $50 yearly fee trust the network, yet it has no plans should there be an acquisition. This seems insecure.

Reasoning

But why, you ask, would we need App.net when Twitter is an open source network that everyone already uses? Because Jack Dorsey's microblogging masterpiece is slowly deteriorating as it tries to accumulate a steady income of sorts. Once a infinitesimal piece of the Internet's delicate fabric, Twitter has grown to become something that people use for more than just socializing. It's an international hub of all major events where accounts like @BreakingNews give you the latest in every significant event you need to know about. Twitter is a realtime alert system, not just the place where people hang out and chat with their so-called "Internet friends". News is made on Twitter.
App.net is, as shown on its Join page, a movement.
Yet somehow, all that is beginning to fall apart thanks to the network attaining the mindset not unlike that of a miser. I'll not go so far as to say that Twitter wants to be greedy and overly lucrative with what they have. I'm just saying that the network is going to lose many valuable users, developers, and supporters if it continues down the "walled garden path". People don't realize how important it is that Twitter keep an open API. They don't understand that this is the beginning of something much worse: a restrictive network. Maybe I'm wrong in taking such an opinion and it's possible that Twitter isn't sure what it's doing yet, but that's their problem and they need to fix it.

Until a resolution arrives, App.net seems to be a reasonable alternative for some. It delivers a healthy promise, yet has a price. Why would people be willing to pay so that they can have a good social experience on the Internet when it costs nothing to walk out the door and take a walk? This continues to baffle me. Supporters of App.net must have a better reason than "it's a good way to network" or "a lot of friends have been migrating there". There should be a bigger picture here and if people are don't see it or have no better reason than the two I just mentioned then I have sympathy for them.

Valuing Users

On the Join page of App.net, you can clearly see that they really do value users, potential or current. They want you to contact them if you have an issue with anything on that page. I'm glad to see that they welcome questions, so long as they answer them thoroughly. If you're even thinking about signing up for the service after reading this article, I urge you to read everything they've provided, including the terms of service, no matter the length -- they really aren't that long, so be sure to read them twice. You're not becoming a user, you're investing in something that has potential, so you have the right to know everything about it.

Concluding

I like to think in the hypothetical with these matters, as you have clearly seen. App.net brings many things to the table, along with a plethora of promises the founder wants to keep. I like to question whether this will be true for long or is just temporary and I like to see whether it's even worth it to test the temperature. There's no way to try out App.net, but there's a three-minute video that might be able to help you out. It doesn't offer a look at the network itself, but merely reiterates the promises listed on the service's "Join the Movement" page. Unhelpful, indeed, but there's always the very dull alpha that you're free to view.

Regardless of my opinion, it will take time to see where App.net is headed and whether it's on the right road.

The bottom line is that App.net leaves most agnostic: it's the plain, blind truth. With time, trust will improve, but I don't see this product being something the Facebook user would want. Even the average Google+ user probably wouldn't care much about it. Anyone with friends on another network is not going to the trouble of convincing their friends to migrate. That's the way people are, no matter the privacy concerns or promises provided.