The first wave of accounts is up for renewal on April 14 — just seven weeks from now. So App.net has seven weeks to convince its early adopters that it’s worth paying more money for another year of service.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Those of us that signed up for the $50/year deal got our subscriptions extended when the price dropped to $36. My renewal date is April 9th 2014 (i.e. more than a year away).
Setting aside that piece of nit picking, Marco's completely right that in order for App.net to be useful to both end users and developers it first needs to be popular. It's a chicken and egg problem in some ways (no users without interesting apps, no interesting apps without a lot of users). Opening the doors with invite-only free accounts goes some of the way towards solving that problem without the scaling issues that would come with unrestricted free accounts.
FYI - He corrected the original post to mark the correct date.
I think that the chicken and egg problem may be a little more fundamental. The major social networks (Twitter/Facebook) first had a compelling application and then later migrated to try to be more like platforms. App.net is trying to be a platform first, without providing a compelling application first. They need at least one killer app to convince people to sign up, and that is what they should be pushing to end-users.
They can push the File API/platform to devs at the same time, but who is their real customer? The end user or the developer? It's hard to figure out.
Both. It's a marketplace for real-time information, and any marketplace always has both buyers and sellers. This is especially important for Twitter, as each person can frequently swap roles.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Those of us that signed up for the $50/year deal got our subscriptions extended when the price dropped to $36. My renewal date is April 9th 2014 (i.e. more than a year away).
Setting aside that piece of nit picking, Marco's completely right that in order for App.net to be useful to both end users and developers it first needs to be popular. It's a chicken and egg problem in some ways (no users without interesting apps, no interesting apps without a lot of users). Opening the doors with invite-only free accounts goes some of the way towards solving that problem without the scaling issues that would come with unrestricted free accounts.