Over the weekend, budding Twitter competitor App.net reached its funding goal of $500,000. Already the service has an alpha website and an API, allowing backers and hackers alike to play with it. As to be expected, the early users are geeky – and mostly male. It’s fun watching a nascent service find its legs. In particular how third party developers are experimenting with the API, which has been available for less than a week. Here’s a look at what App.net is currently, along with some early third party apps.
App.net is a short messaging service like Twitter. The key differences are: a) it has a 256 character limit instead of 140, b) there won’t be any ads on it, and c) users can control their own data (for example export it).
App.net exists because its founders believe that Twitter has become too focused on advertisers, instead of the users and developers which are at the heart of any social service.
Here’s what App.net looks like in its present, very early, incarnation:
The directory of third party devs and apps, on GitHub, is beginning to fill out with web services, mobile apps and browser extensions. Here are just a few of the early third party apps, which give a taste of things to come:
We’re all excited to see what App.net will turn into. Some of us from ReadWriteWeb are playing in the sandbox: yours truly Richard MacManus @ricmac; Jon Mitchell @ablaze (user #18, he proudly notes); Dan Frommer @fromedome.
Or perhaps, rather than us nerds, you’d prefer to follow Stephen Fry, a celebrity Twitter user who – just like the rest of us – is curious to see if App.net will take off.