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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

They wanted to build an open, paid version of the Twitter API/ecosystem. But the value of the Twitter API lay in the access to their 100 million+ users, and all the valuable social data generated by those 100 million+ users. No amount of "open infrastructure", no matter how clever can ever replace that. It's like buying 1000 data centers in every country, and building an entire system that can handle a billion concurrent users, and saying "Yeah, we can take on Facebook with this", then realize the hard part was getting users, not scaling the infrastructure.

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It's not open. It's closed, proprietary and the boys over at Andressen-Horowitz are going to want a return on their investment.

They've embraced open standards: http://blog.app.net/2013/08/07/response-to-brennan-novak-par...

And they have started releasing client source code: https://github.com/appdotnet/

a16z is already getting a return, since App.net has been profitable for a while. It's all gravy since they've made it free to sign up. The user base is about 10 times bigger than last year. It's true we don't know how many new users are paying but since that fixed costs are covered, it doesn't really matter.

Why do I have to read this comment every time App.net gets brought up? Is every conversation about App.net doomed to turn into a debate about whether it will succeed, and if not why?

In a discussion about an article written about whether App.net will succeed, that seems like a pretty logical thing to be talking about, no? It's not like he hijacked something completely unrelated and changed the topic.

I suppose that's fair, but I still find this line of thought tiresome. At least the article is arguing that App.net's problem is that it's too much like Twitter when it could be used for more, rather than the usual tired argument that Twitter's success is simply network effects, therefore App.net cannot succeed. After all, as a business, App.net is already a success; it doesn't need runaway growth to be sustained.

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