Dalton Caldwell’s Audacious Proposal
Dalton Caldwell is refocusing App.net into a realtime feed platform, which he proposed in What Twitter Could Have Been:
I believe so deeply in the importance of having a financially sustainable realtime feed API & service that I am going to refocus App.net to become exactly that. I have the experience, vision, infrastructure and team to do it. Additionally, we already have much of this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes, and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system. This isn’t vaporware.
To manifest this grand vision, we are officially launching a Kickstarter-esque campaign. We will only accept money for this financially sustainable, ad-free service if we hit what I believe is critical mass. I am defining minimum critical mass as $500,000, which is roughly equivalent to ~10,000 backers.
This is really awesome, and I have a lot of thoughts on this subject that I’ll be writing about soon. The internet needs a standardized realtime feed API. And Caldwell is the perfect guy to build it. Read Dalton’s article.