"He could simply have a marketing problem at this point, although he's done pretty well thus far if that's the case."
The message may by cloudy, but it's out there, which is the most impressive part of this in my opinion. App.net may be a good idea, but it's not really an original idea. And I had honestly never heard of Dalton Caldwell before this, and even now, he doesn't quite seem a Silicon Valley A-lister.
I'm not trying to knock him or the service, but I can't figure out how he got everyone talking about this so much. There's a million kinda-good-sounding start up ideas floating around out there and even the best of them often die due to lack of traction or being drowned out. And yet even though app.net doesn't even look like it's going to get through initial funding, it's all over the tech community.
He's relatively plugged into the SV tech scene. He also struck a cord with his original blog post[1]. App.net was obviously just a reaction to the outpouring of support for the ideas he expressed in that post. This could just be proof that 80,000+ page views of a blog post does not equal $500K in paid users at $50, $100, or $1,000 a pop.
More recently he received a ton of attention from his open letter to Zuck[2].
The message may by cloudy, but it's out there, which is the most impressive part of this in my opinion. App.net may be a good idea, but it's not really an original idea. And I had honestly never heard of Dalton Caldwell before this, and even now, he doesn't quite seem a Silicon Valley A-lister.
I'm not trying to knock him or the service, but I can't figure out how he got everyone talking about this so much. There's a million kinda-good-sounding start up ideas floating around out there and even the best of them often die due to lack of traction or being drowned out. And yet even though app.net doesn't even look like it's going to get through initial funding, it's all over the tech community.