A response to Brennan Novak

Brennen Novak just wrote an interesting post that nicely sums up some of the criticisms regarding join.app.net.

At the bottom of his post, he asks me to publicly state/clarify some important questions.

Perhaps that’s biggest flaw with how App.net was presented thus far. Perhaps if Dalton had promised one or more of the following…

I am publicly stating that, if backing is succesful, App.net will support the following things:

• Activitystrea.ms Atom & JSON feeds, as well as RSS feeds, of public posts for individual users, hashtags, etc. (Note that this is different from making them the foundation of our read/write API, which we have decided not to do)
• Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) support (as a publisher, initially)
• Exposing user identities with Webfinger
• Commitment to coordinate between internal and external parties to create and support open-source “lightweight” clients in as many flavors as we can, ala Stripe
• Commit to enabling and supporting users in building inbound and outbound syndication to and from App.net

Long story short, as the social web evolves, we want to be able to provide the hooks into our service for users to syndicate content in and out via current and emerging standards.

Please let the above list show that we will pragmatically implement features and standards at the request of our customers: developers and users.