Justin McCandless

App.net, the $10/month social network initiative by Dalton Caldwell, recently announced its developer incentive program, which pays developers on their platform based on a usefulness survey given to users. This is once again in stark contrast to the other big players, whose developers mostly end up paying them for API bandwidth. Is this step in the right direction for creating the open social platform that users and developers are looking for? If it’s at the scale currently announced, it will probably end up being more short term developer bait than a large-scale business model change.

Projects like Diaspora and now App.net brought us a step closer to an open social network ecosystem that a fan of open source can’t help but dream of. As a user, you own all of your own posts, pictures, and friends, and take them with you to use in whatever web app you want. As a developer, you can quickly develop engaging social apps knowing that you will easily have access to all of this social content for all willing users. This is a dreamworld for innovation and probably even privacy, but one that we’re simply not going to see via the advertising based business model of companies like Facebook and Twitter.

If some company is going to step up and create this solid open platform for developers of all types to build on, how does paying developers to create apps for your platform fit into this? If there are going to be huge independent apps that will hopefully grow off of this stable platform which is hosting all the data like App.net is, the opposite strategy of charging the developers seems to make more sense. How does this new move by App.net fit in to this big picture of an open social platform?

These are all places my mind wandered upon seeing this news, until I realized that it’s insignificant. Dalton Caldwell quotes a monthly pool of $20,000 to pay these developers, and the amount they receive is not based on traffic or usage. Divided up as much as it will be, this is frankly not a lot of money next to what a big app has the potential to make in advertising. In its early stage, App.net is simply trying to attract a bunch of small-time, innovative developers to make cool apps on their platform. While we might not understand fully what App.net will be as it enters the more stable side of development, both as software and as a business, this developer incentive program will not be a core part of the company.

It remains to see how we’ll get to the open web milestone of dominant open social networking, but this small announcement doesn’t offer a whole lot of insight. I’m still excited to follow the progress of App.net and Diaspora though, and hopefully we’ll have more answers to that soon enough.