Why I Backed App.net And I Hope You Will Too

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Lame title, I know, but I wanted to title this very clearly as to what this post is about. As you may well know from talking to me in person, on Twitter, or by reading this site I've been a big advocate over the past year of switching to services that allow you to be the customer and not the product. I came to this decision a year ago when I switched off of Gmail to Fastmail, off of Google Calendar to iCloud, Google Analytics to Mint, Google Reader to Fever to name just a few big ones. I used to be a big advocate and user of Google, but the way the company has been ran over the past 3-4 years has rubbed me the wrong way. I liked Google during the days which they cooperating with Apple and didn't seek to undercut them at every turn.
Turning to Facebook, I was an early user. In college, I signed up when you still had to have an .edu email address to join. It was fun & useful for a few years until Facebook allowed what they call "apps" & then it went to shit. You couldn't log in without being spammed to death with utter crap posts. I began to use it less and less. And then in January 2007 I joined Twitter. Twitter was perfect. The design was clean. The content was simple. I liked the constraint of 140 characters. As time passed, I began to rely on Twitter more and more for everything. As a result of Twitter, I check my RSS reader apps about once a week, now getting most of my daily news through Twitter sources. Many of my local friends are on Twitter and I've met so many wonderful people across the web that I would not have known otherwise because of the service. People that I have great respect for are on Twitter. In short, I really enjoy Twitter. And then came the Dickbar. And the veiled threats against developers to quit making 3rd party Twitter clients. And the design decisions that made Tweetie into an abomination of its former self. And the lack of updates for Twitter for Mac for over a year. These things combined have let me worried about the future of Twitter. The consistent lack of good decision making by the leadership of Twitter leaves me anxious for a Twitter alternative in which users are able to pay the service for access to it so that service can continue to develop the service for the users and not for the advertisers in order to pay for it. And that's the key isn't it? Twitter's bad decisions derive from the need to pay for Twitter. Twitter has taken hundreds of million in venture capital money, and because Twitter is "free", advertisers have to pay Twitter to keep it going. So what is Twitter to do? They must make the advertisers happy. To make more money, they must put more focus on their advertisers needs. Meanwhile the users are the product. That makes me very nervous. I just want to continue to use iPad, iPhone and OS X clients to access the service that I truly love. I do not want to be force fed Twitter's bad UX decisions so that they can monetize their service off of my eyeballs. I've told you all of this in order to explain why I've backed App.net. What is App.net? In short, App.net is a Twitter clone with a classic business model. The users pay a fee (50$ initially) to join the service. Users must pay this fee annually. By doing this, the service is able to pay for itself and focus its development and design resources on the users and not advertisers or what their venture capitalist sugar daddies want them to. Some people have said this idea will fail. Some people have criticized App.net for a few poorly made marketing decisions early on when they first announced their intentions. I've given them a pass on all of these things because I desperately hope they will succeed. If they do not succeed, then who will? If any of this makes sense to you, I suggest you check out join.app.net. App.net is trying to start their initial funding via kickstarter-like campaign. They cannot use Kickstarter because Kickstarter's own terms of service forbid companies from using it to start a new company. So they've setup the equivalent off of their own website. A lot of notable people have gotten on board and contributed their respective $50 as well. App.net already has an early alpha version online for you to take a look at. If you email join@app.net once you've backed the project and ask, they'll go ahead and activate your account which they're doing for people manually. If you back the project and are let in, you can find me there @joel. As of this writing, App.net sits at $325,400 of their $500,000 goal. There are 4 days left to contribute. As of yesterday, it looked as if App.net's campaign would fail miserably short of its goal, sitting at around $245,000 committed. But then, John Gruber posted about this on Daring Fireball yesterday evening. Since then they've picked up over $80,000 since. If this rate of contributions keep up they might just meet their goal by Monday. I hope this succeeds. Update: Less than $60,009 to go! Just over 48 hours to do it.

The Mac App Store's Future Of Irrelevance

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Marco Arment, writes:

In the first year of the Mac App Store, before sandboxing, I bought as much as I could from it. As a customer, the convenience was so great that I even repurchased a few apps that I already owned just to have the App Store updates and reinstallation convenience. And, most importantly, when an app was available both in and out of the Mac App Store, I always bought the App Store version, even if it was more expensive. But now, I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated. I agree whole-heartedly with Marco on this. When the Mac App Store first came out, I began buying everything on it, and why not? It was great! I could sit down at any of my 4 Macs and instantly have access (well, with download times maybe not quite instantly - but easily) to all of my OS X software. I began to snug apps who weren't on the Mac App Store unless I absolutely needed them, such as SuperDuper!. And then, Apple had to rain on its own parade with Sandboxing and Entitlements. Now, I've had to purchase newer versions of several apps off of the Mac App Store because they've pulled out due to Apple's onerous restrictions that break core functionality of their apps. Apps that have been hampered by the Mac App Store that I rely on or are very popular: Textexpander, Alfred (which you cannot get from the MAS if you want to add-on their 'Powerpack' functionality due to the inability for in-app purchases), Hazel, SuperDuper!, Reflection, all of Atlassian's apps, Postbox. Myself, Manton Reece, Daniel Jalkut and others have been keeping a running list of articles on Pinboard about apps that have pulled out or have had updates rejected due to Sanboxing shenanigans. Someone at Apple who has the power to step in and reverse this poor direction Apple is currently taking with the Mac App Store had better do so soon, otherwise they are going to either doom the Mac App Store from being a long term success or lose years of progress while they recover from this bad decision years from now.

OS X Mountain Lion Review Roundup

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iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store This morning, Apple released OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) on the Mac App Store, for $19.95. I have been using Mountain Lion since Beta 3 as a part of the OS X Developer Program. While there were a few bugs during the betas, as to be expected, the ones I noticed were all fixed by Apple by the time they released the GM Seed to developers a few weeks ago. Since then, the OS has been rock solid. There are lots of new features, many of which I think you'll appreciate. Rather than attempt to explain them to you myself, I wanted to list a few places where you can go read reviews of Mountain Lion written by the veteran reviewers themselves. First and foremost, I want to point out, that John Siracusa has once again written one of his famous OS X reviews (Web or Kindle) . John's review, which weighs in at 25,935 words, is the most in-depth review of all reviews. John has famously written epicly detailed reviews of OS X going on for over a decade now. His reviews are a must-read by die hard Apple users, so much so that Marco Arment has wrote a review of his review (which is quite funny to read).

Review Roundup

  1. John Siracusa - "OS X Mountain Lion" (Web or Kindle)
  2. John Gruber - "Mountain Lion"
  3. Jason Snell - "OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)"
  4. MG Siegler - "OS X Mountain Lion: Quick, Familiar, Cheap, And Drenched In iOS Goodness"
  5. Jim Dalrymple - "Apple Releases OS X Mountain Lion"
  6. Wayne Dixon - Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and ML Server via Web, Kindle
  7. Federico Viticci - "OS X Mountain Lion Review"
  8. Richard Gaywood - "OS X Mountain Lion: The TUAW Review"
  9. Shawn Blanc - "Mountain Lion and the Simplification of OS X"
  10. Harry McCracken - "Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review: The Mac's Lion Adventure Continues" While a lot of these reviews, or probably all, talk about the same topics, like me you may wish to read them all as I respect the views of each author and each author will have a different take on these features. Also, some reviewers will catch details that the others miss. I like to have a thorough understanding of the tools I use, so knowing as much as possible about OS X is desirable to me. I find that reading all of these reviews each year when new OS X versions come out gives me that knowledge.

Evening Edition

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Jim ray, at Off the Hoof, Mule's Blog:

Now, we’re all constantly awash in a torrent of news-like “updates”, in between fake celebrity death tweets, divorce notices on Facebook and new-puppy tumblrs. How is anyone supposed to sift through all of that to get to the important stuff? The answer to Jim's question is Evening Edition. Mule has launched a clean, concise summary of the day's news published in time for your commute home that talks about the major news events of the day in short summaries, linking to more in-depth versions of the story. Evening Edition is edited by the lovely Anna Rascouët-Paz. As I told Katie and Mike over Twitter earlier: Evening Edition + Instapaper = commuter heaven.