App.net’s crowdfunders: Taken for a ride?

Last week App.net reached the milestone of 10,000 users who signed up for a new — mostly yet to be written — social network that looks like an early reimplementation of Twitter. Signing up people to claim user names on an vaporware alpha Web service may not seem surprising or novel, but this time there’s a difference: Everyone who signed up for App.net paid $50 for the privilege.

While App.net looks like a clone of Twitter, as GigaOm points out, the current alpha service is best considered a test case. The real goal of App.net is apparently to provide an open messaging bus for applications to share data on a CB-radio-like basis, with public broadcasts on an infinite number of public channels. This “digital CB” has many possible applications; Twitter-like microblogging is but one. App.net is intended to be a platform.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Bill Snyder decries Twitter’s fake followers and their negative impact on the whole system. | Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld’s Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]

Paying in advance for something that sounds cool is not unusual any more in the age of Kickstarter. In the case where the donation is just an advance purchase of a physical product, that’s a good way to approach the launch of new ideas. For example, I rather like the Coffee Joulies I bought on Kickstarter; I also like the idea that my advance purchase gave young entrepreneurs a break. It was a win-win, with me getting an interesting product and them getting the seed money to start production without having to give away a stake in their business to a VC (not to mention Kickstarter earning its cut of the deal).

$50 will get you bus fare

App.net has used the same crowdfunding approach, but it’s not the same kind of project. While superficially similar — there’s an offer of immediate use of its Twitter-clone service and reservation of the user ID of your choice — it’s much more speculative. It’s crowdsourcing the seed capital for a new venture, crowdsourcing the design, crowdsourcing the testing, and crowdsourcing most of the software that interacts with the venture, all without actually giving anyone but the founder a true stake in the outcome.

I find this really surprising. At the very least, there should be concrete guarantees that the resulting service will be a community of peers. But the one thing conspicuously absent from App.net is any concept of a true community of peers. App.net talks frequently about “third-party developers” — even proposing ways of sharing its future wealth with them — but in a world of true peers, there are no third parties, only first and second parties. The only way to offer actual concrete guarantees of a community of peers is to embrace the concepts of software freedom and create an open source project.

The guy behind App.net, Dalton Caldwell, says on his website he “does things the hard way.” Caldwell has built a straw man describing what Twitter is about, then scathingly ridiculed it, over and over. All the same, he appears to be reinventing an existing, open source wheel.

Another Twitter “clone” is Identi.ca, built by free culture visionary Evan Prodromou. Identi.ca is actually a “sample app” itself, for the highly capable StatusNet software, an infrastructure that can be used to build a wide range of Web applications. In fact, the vision Caldwell is explaining for App.net looks very much like StatusNet, except for a crucial difference.

By the way, I’m in charge

App.net currently embodies a hierarchical vision, where a single top-level provider delivers the infrastructure everyone shares. This is quite unlike StatusNet, which embodies a federated vision of social data networking. If you want to run your own private instance of StatusNet you can — it’s open source, after all. Then if you want to join up with the rest of the planet, you can federate with other instances, creating a meshed data bus with many connection pathways. By contrast, App.net appears to want to maintain a commercial control point on the market it hopes to create.

App.net seems to solve a problem that StatusNet already addresses, except the latter is federated and protects your freedoms and privacy by letting you choose whether to use the public instance or a private, federated, open source instance. The fact App.net is charging money is not itself the main problem; it is that App.net is a closed system that does not federate with software I can run myself. Thus, I can’t control my own data, social presence, and applications without needing to trust the founder of App.net.

That’s not to say I don’t, although the fact Caldwell feels he has to tell everyone they can trust him in many of his blog posts suggests he sees the problem. No, the point is I shouldn’t need to trust him; I should be able to develop solutions on this platform without becoming a sharecropper.

While the word “open” is all over the place in the App.net documentation, including in the API documentation on GitHub and in promises of open standards, the phrase “open source” is conspicuously absent and the concept of “software freedom” is never mentioned. Indeed, even the API specification lacks licensing information, which ought to give pause to anyone considering its use.

Trust me because I say so A federated architecture like that of StatusNet allows me to collaborate with others interested in the same technology without being their client. The value of federated software is that it offers me a trade-off I can choose myself. Either I can join the public instance and allow its host to control my online presence, or I can run my own instance — federated with the public instance(s) — and be responsible for the effort of running the service, but remain in control of my information and presence.

So what does App.net have going for it? A proof-of-concept Twitter clone, for sure. A torrent of great ideas, certainly. And $500,000 that’s been given as a gift? Definitely. But its main asset is 10,000 people who want an open infrastructure for digital CB enough to risk $50 to see if it works out. That initial user base is worth at least as much as the money and will be a hard taskmaster.

But for all the great words about “open” and “choice” and “ad-free” and all the other knocks against Twitter and Facebook and others, it lacks a vision for a future where open source software implements a federated architecture to create a community of peers who are free to leave but choose to stay. In the end, Dalton Caldwell and App.net need to embrace a vision of software freedom if they are truly to deserve our trust.

This article, “App.net’s crowdfunders: Taken for a ride?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.