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Twitter is planning to restrict access to its API, and developers are worried. Some are publicly protesting via their blogs and group petitions. One bold group is seeking to build a full-featured social network to compete against Twitter and other ad-supported social networks.
After having raised $600,000 (and counting) via fundraising platform Kickstarter, the team behind App.net is ready to build a "real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers." The solution? An open, ad-free network funded by users (who pay $50 per year for basic access) and developers (who pay $100 year for API access and support).
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The campaign was inspired by a widely circulated entry that App.net co-founder Dalton Caldwell (who is also a co-founder of picplz) posted on his personal blog. In the post, Caldwell argues that Twitter has failed to reach its potential because it has sold out to advertisers. "Twitter could [have been] one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet via their powerful API," he recalls. Instead, "the advertising group [at Twitter] won," and now Twitter's next step will be to "kill all third-party clients… [in order] to control the 'content,'" he writes.
Caldwell's vision and ambition is commendable, but can it work? The web, after all, has a history of championing its rights to "free" -- free music and access to information among them. Just think of the protests surrounding Napster's shutdown, or The New York Times's paywall.
But it's clear that some -- that is, the more than 9,000 people who backed the project on Kickstarter -- think it very well can.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
