Been on a plane all day, so a bit tired. But I got to spend a lot of time thinking about App.net on the plane, and it's got my quite excited. So in keeping with my old writing style, here comes a lot of disconnected thoughts. 

. . .

It's been quite some time since I've written in this thing with any regularity. In the years I've been away, I've immersed myself in the Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, and the Instagram world. The mobile world is exciting, and clearly it's helping the growth of products which thrive on stealing your attention for 10 minutes at a time (information consumption, games, etc.). I worked in a product in the enterprise space and left, never vowing to do it again, before finding myself in midst of starting another enterprise SaaS service. But you (old) readers should know that my love has always been in building sites for people to share their stories. That's what led to me building Tabulas *9* years ago. I never stopped thinking about Tabulas and how to improve it. (Now, having time + resources to address it is something else altogether). 

Let's face it: Tabulas suffered because it got much easier to share stories on other sites. And it wasn't even the creation of the stories that was important - it was the feedback you got. It was much easier to build and maintain a community on those other sites. 

. . .

But I sense that this is fading. As pressure mounts on the Twitter and Facebooks of the world to monetize, the feature sets aren't as enticing. I've seen a dropoff from my friends' activity across a lot of these sites, and I'm beginning to re-thinking my metric for  measuring "success" of a social network - I no longer think it's the size of the network that matters, but more the quality. Svbtle has been doing a great job of proving this point. 

Tabulas did pretty damn good in the early days (of course, this was really pre-FB) in picking up $28/year subscriptions from its users, with no real difference between the premium and free versions. But then came the flood of ad-driven sites that caused the price to drop to $0, which really destroyed the ability for Tabulas to continue product development. We tried ads for a bit, found out they didn't work, and basically let the site flounder. We were living in an ad-driven product world, when what we really wanted was the users to pay for our product. 

. . .

But now I'm starting to believe that there could be a world where people would pay to join a site like Tabulas, and it could support itself immensely well. The Apple iOS community proves people will pay for software again, as long as it is high quality. 

Now, I don't think ad-driven sites like Twitter/Facebook/Google+ will ever fail - I simply believe they will be the commoditized products of the world. The lowest common denominator. Like McDonald's with food - everybody has been there, they fill you up... but do you really want to eat all your meals there? 

I think the next generation of social networks will provide polished, hand-crafted apps that people *love* to use and pay for. This is already happening on the iOS platform, but hasn't made its way to the web yet (the technial reasons for this deserve its own blog post). 

. . .

In my mind, Tabulas goes back to its roots as a journaling-driven social network. We strive, once again, to build a high-quality journaling product that allows people to easily and freely share their stories. But I can't provide the social graph - creating great writing tools and allowing people to connect is too hard. 

And that's where the problem lies. I won't delve into the issues with FB Connect, but I'm not convinced that Tabulas could survive in a world where the social graph lies with FB. (It mostly has to do with the fact that users who use FB expect free, and also the ability to gain traction via FB has largely been limited due to their throttling of viral social growth after abuses in the past). 

. . .

So imagine my joy to hear about App.net. Right now, it's nothing more than an idea; a call to arms. The gist is the following: it's a social network that is not driven by advertisers, but by its users. You pay for a great social networking services, and you get an awesome product in return. It's a great idea. Social networking is the killer app of the Internet, and I see no reason why people wouldn't pay for it. 

The price? A measly $50/year. Given that FB only generates $5/user per year, the business model seems - at first glance - decent. 

What gets me excited about this? 

Well, App.net will focus on providing the base tools to build data (posts, images, etc.) and the name brand should be enough to start building the social graph. Tabulas can focus on building a great product for sharing stories. 

IF App.net (a big if) can position itself as a high-quality exclusive social network, it should have NO problem drawing in people to pay for it. And IF those people are in App.net, and they get access to a series of high-quality apps on TOP of App.net, there should be no reason why app builders on top cannot make a good income building high-quality products that people love to use. 

To me, that'd be the perfect world. The commoditization of social networking tools has really hurt the user experience across the board (with the exception of mobile Twitter), and I think people are starting to get bored. There's an army of developer craftsmen who want to pursue perfection, but need a market to do so. So far, the Apple iOS ecosystem is the only one - but one doesn't exist for the web. 

If App.net can change this by creating a marketplace on the web for developers on top of a solid social graph, *that* is a game changer for developers. 

. . .

So far, the API is non-existent. The core decisions seem good, though. I do agree that the data needs to be centralized - I've long dreamed of a decentralized world, but it won't work. JSON (implicitly REST) for the API is great for a lightweight transport format. The fear with API design is always you abstract too much - hopefully they set a deadline and work against that with real use cases for the API. (And of course, don't be afraid to make breaking changes to the API). 

In any case, they are soliciting donations for App.net - only when they get $500K pledged will this start to become a reality. And I hope they get there, cause I do feel this is a game changer. (And that should mean something, I've only really used that phrase when Amazon S3 launched).