A new social network designed to be everything Facebook or Twitter will never be just reached its funding goal – and it’s still counting money and backers. App.net, that’s the name of the project, can now reckon on more than 500,000 dollars from thousands of users and developers.
Started by digital music entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell (imeem), App.net wants to be more than a “social network” in Facebook style: the developers say they are creating “a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers”.
App.net will accept users and app developers for a $50 per year fee: in exchange it will offer a platform designed to share short textual messages (like Twitter, but with 256 characters at max) among users, and to let coders create their on-line applications and services free of the pain experienced on the most popular social networks available today.
Caldwell said that he had the idea for App.net after his negative experience as a developer on the Facebook app network: the new project supposedly started because “advertising-supported social services are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers” that something different “must be done”.
While announcing that the project has met its funding goal, Caldwell explained that the team is now working on implementing the infrastructure on which the new “social utility” will run and asks third parties to verify that the crowdfunding campaign “was operated in an honest manner”. App.net is not vapourware, Caldwell promised.
Source: VentureBeat
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