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Writer's pictureFahad H

App.net, A Twitter Competitor, Crowdsources $500,000 In Funding


Some in the marketing and developer communities are buzzing with the weekend’s news that App.net, a potential Twitter competitor,

raised more than $500,000 in funding — not from venture capitalists, but from its new users.

With about 12 hours left in its fund raising window, App.net currently says it’s raised $734,850 from 11,205 supporters.

App.net is the brainchild of Dalton Caldwell, who founded the now-defunct social/music site imeem in 2003. Caldwell most recently made headlines for a Dear Mark Zuckerberg letter in which he wrote about the frustrations of dealing with Facebook’s merger and acquisitions team.

With App.net, Caldwell is building a Twitter-like social site with a couple key differences:

  1. Posts can be up to 256 characters long.

  2. App.net will be ad-free.

  3. Account-holders will pay to use App.net. The base account is $50 for one year, and there are developer and “pro” accounts at $100 and $1,000, respectively.

The join/support page advertises App.net as “a different kind of social platform. We’re building a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers.”

appnet-join

The developer angle may be what’s really driving the project. App.net promises an open approach to developers. Its API has been available for less than a week, but there’s already a Github-based third-party app directory with dozens of projects listed.

Twitter, on the other hand, has been getting more tight-fisted with its API. Its new approach to API access has already impacted users of popular sites like LinkedIn and Instagram.

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