It’s Not a Verb

John Gruber summarizing the App.net thing:

In a nut, App.net is a startup aiming to build a rival platform to Twitter, “where users and developers come first, not advertisers.” How? By generating revenue from users instead of from advertisers. They’re not using Kickstarter but they’ve built their own Kickstarter-like system.

Like Gruber, I respect what the people at App.net are doing but it’s not going to work, even if they do reach their funding goal.
The reason? App.net’s service is not a verb. I’m not saying every online service has to be a verb, but ‘googling’ and ‘tweeting’ have a tremendous amount of momentum with regular, non-nerdy, non-developer people. You might say, “Facebook isn’ a verb and look how big they are.” Sure, but they own ‘Like’ and before that they owned ‘Poke’.
There’s nothing I can see with App.net the general public can get behind. Even with all the negative moves Twitter is making with how it’s handling third-party developers, Twitter isn’t broken (yet).

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