Nth'ing the "I don't know what this is" crowd. To the majority of the population, "Twitter before it became a media company" is still just today's Twitter. Most people don't care about ads, unfortunately, and only a relatively tiny group of developers care about the growing restrictions.
Take off the developer hat for a moment; how would App.net improve my life? I read a great piece of marketing advice recently: in one sentence, create a problem, then tell me how your product solves it.
I am appealing to developers because I think they are the intended audience. I only think that is the most important experimental test.
From my personal blog post:
"Although Paul Graham is specifically describing a hypothetical new search engine rather than a new realtime feed service/API in this inspiring blogpost, his assertions about the power of 10,000 committed users are highly relevant:
The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that size.
Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."
Take off the developer hat for a moment; how would App.net improve my life? I read a great piece of marketing advice recently: in one sentence, create a problem, then tell me how your product solves it.