Nth'ing the "I don't know what this is" crowd. To the majority of the population, "Twitter before it became a media company" is still just today's Twitter. Most people don't care about ads, unfortunately, and only a relatively tiny group of developers care about the growing restrictions.

Take off the developer hat for a moment; how would App.net improve my life? I read a great piece of marketing advice recently: in one sentence, create a problem, then tell me how your product solves it.

I am appealing to developers because I think they are the intended audience. I only think that is the most important experimental test.

From my personal blog post: "Although Paul Graham is specifically describing a hypothetical new search engine rather than a new realtime feed service/API in this inspiring blogpost, his assertions about the power of 10,000 committed users are highly relevant:

The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that size.

Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good."

I wonder if google plus shows that a 10-50k person developer, non google employee early adopter market exists for this product.

Or if it shows that 10-50k is not a critical mass for a social product.

I appreciate the need for vagueness in your answer to the question of "What exactly are you building?" I'm sure in many ways you and your team don't know exactly how it's going to grow and change, and I for one would rather have the team making this thing be flexible and reactive as opposed to building to a spec that was promised to customers.

I think you would be able to reach more people more powerfully if you spent more time talking about your vision for what Twitter could have been had they not gone the ad route. As a designer working in the web industry, I am just as excited as you are about the potential for this thing, but I think most people need it explained a bit further to really get on board.

Perhaps you could highlight some of the really cool stuff that was built with the Twitter API that they then squashed. Talk about the potential OUTCOMES of this system, not just the origins of it. Hell, maybe even take some proposals from excited designers/developers for what they would do with said API, then use those proposals as a demonstration of the system's potential.

You've got my money.

dalton, I think that's a good answer but it needs to be way above the fold. I had to watch the video before I knew exactly what was up.

Hey Dalton & crew – congrats on this launch. I think that technologically, it's mostly clear what you want to build, but the thing that might be confusing is just that it is only described as "a real-time feed and API." Although you mention it's "Twitter-like," there still feels like there's some ambiguity in what type of content this feed is used for, especially since it's a paid service with the name App.net. For example, I don't know if I'm signing up to have a new social service, or a service that I'll mostly utilize in conjunction with app development, etc.

Pro tip: nobody should have to find the FAQ. Esp. if you're crowdfunding.