App.net is going to bite the dust in a couple of weeks. Started five years ago, it was that most novel of Silly Con Valley propositions: the provision of an online service in exchange for cash on the !-ing barrelhead. Like Twitter, but ad-free, 256 characters per message, and with an API framework to allow it to be used for other things going forward. All in all, a delightful notion…that went absolutely nowhere. Because Twitter had a four year head start and is “free.” Just as Facebook is “free.”
Social media networks have to be free. They simply have to. Because their entire value proposition is based on having everyone on them. And their entire business model relies on endless ever-spiraling growth. And you can’t grow at unnatural speeds if people have to pay for the service. Never mind the hassle of digging out a credit card and evaluating whether it’s worth paying money for your whatever-it-is, you then have to have a secure payment mechanism and protect the data and keep track of…it’s hardly worth the effort, is it?
More to the point, unlimited growth because “free” makes it a lot easier to pitch to advertisers and data miners (but I repeat myself). I am prepared to bet that Twitter could not actually make money charging for their service (I am prepared to bet that Twitter cannot make money full stop, and I doubt whether Snapchat will either) and that at a minimum, the amount they would have to charge to make up for no ad revenue and the shrink from loss of unwilling-to-pay users would combine to put them in a SoMa alleyway with a quickness.
And still we struggle, because Twitter and Facebook are largely garbage. The only way you can make them useful is to set them as private, lock them down to a fare-thee-well, pare your list of friends and followers aggressively, and make absolutely sure that none of them is going to go feral on you. And things being how they are, if you just want to get away from the madness of the world, you can’t do it on Twitter or Facebook.
Which is where Instagram comes in.
Yes, it’s owned by Facebook, but perhaps realizing how shit they are at mobile has led Facebook to leave their acquisition alone. And it’s completely dissociated from my existing Facebook account (which goes largely unused these days). And it has become the only “social media” that I keep on the phone and check routinely, because for the most part they’re either people I know or people whose posts I find interesting. And in a pinch, there’s even a chat client. It’s simple, it feeds the escape urge, and at least it doesn’t make me feel like the world is collapsing around me.
Sic transit App.net and Peach and Path and Ello and Diaspora and all the other attempts to get around the Tweetbook duopoly of social media. It’s the Gram or nothing at this point.