So I’ve plunked down 100 bucks for an early bird developer account at join.app.net, a new social network. So why would anyone pay for something like this, if Facebook and Twitter and everything else is free? Because it isn’t.
Facebook and Twitter live off selling their users to advertisers. Nothing wrong with that, but it means that more and more, they choose to implement features and control the user experience to maximize value for the advertisers. What the users want and how they would like to be treated becomes less important. And third-party applications and their developers make things complicated, since they do not help generating ad revenue, so more and more, they’re shut out or severely restricted.
Dalton Caldwell was annoyed by that, decided to do something about it: create a new social media platform, but instead of financing it through advertising, have the users pay for it. At least in principle, it aligns the interests of the platform company with that of the users, since happy users will generate more revenue. Right now, it’s an experiment (but it’s looking like it might get very successful, with over 12.000 paying users signing up in less than two months). Right now I have the bragging rights to be the first among my friends to have signed up, but that mainly means that none of my friends are on app.net yet. We’ll see if that changes within the next 12 months.
Which brings me to the second service: if-this-then-that, or IFTTT for short. I now have a plethora of social media accounts, and distributing the various thoughts that I sometimes find worth publishing can become tedious. IFTTT helps with that: it monitors your account on any of 30 or so services (you decided with ones), and then cross-posts new posts from one service to any other one of your choosing. You decide which service to monitor and what to post where by settings up simple recipes: if I publish a new blog post, take it’s title and URL and post it to app.net, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve just started using it, but from what I can see from my friends using it, it looks like a very useful tool.