Categorie: Dalton Caldwell

Ad-free Social Platform App.net Goes Freemium With Free, Invite-Only Plan

App.net, Dalton Caldwell, social, Startups, TC

app net logoApp.net, the project that emerged from founder Dalton Caldwell’s desire to build a social platform that wasn’t driven by advertising, is adding its first free option today.

Given Caldwell’s emphasis on creating a product that people are actually willing to pay for, this might seem like a step backwards, or one of those infamous startup “pivots.” However, Caldwell told me that this actually isn’t a change of plans, and to back that up he pointed to his initial blog post announcing the project back in July. The post didn’t explicitly say that that there are going to be both paid and free tiers, but the two positive examples of non-advertising companies that Caldwell cited are Dropbox and particularly Github, which both offer free services and then charge for additional features.

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Twitter Does A Lot Of Different Things For Different People, Deal With It

Dalton Caldwell, pivot, social, Startups, TC, Twitter

2227042939_83570e03ef_zToday, Dalton Caldwell, founder of things that have pivoted called out Twitter in a blog post for well…pivoting. His post received many “kudos” on blogging software Svbtle, which amounts to those fake points that Drew Carey used to give out on “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?”

Caldwell is currently working on App.net, the pay-to-post service that I can’t get a straight answer out of anyone on, when it comes to how it’s doing or whether anyone really likes it. When I hop on the service, yes I paid for an account to support it, all I see is cross-posts from other services, and well…you might know how I feel about cross-posting.

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7-Weeks In, Dalton Caldwell’s App.net Gets First Dedicated iOS App, Passes 17,500 Users

App.net, apps, Dalton Caldwell, mobile, social, Startups, TC, Twitter

mzl.rvtbbxxb.320x480-75Back in July, Dalton Caldwell (of imeem and picplz fame) announced an “audacious” goal: To create a better, developer-and-user-supported (and ad-free) alternative to Twitter. And so App.net was born. About a month later, the subscription-based, third party app-supporting Twitter clone reached its fund-raising goal of $500K — all of which came from a community of 7,500+ enthusiastic supporters.

Though the service has a long way to go before it can compete with the big boys, today, the App.net founder announced some milestones that show it’s making some solid progress. Over 250K posts have been created in the 7-weeks since App.net’s debut, with some 50 percent of posts coming from third-party clients. As of August 28th, the service has over 17,500 (paying) users, which works out to about 14 posts per user. Not only that, but as reported by The Next Web, today the service’s first dedicated iOS client officially hit the App Store.

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