I got halfway down the page, to the part where he appears to have picked a bug tracker project at random to call "me-too" and compare to a "Pascal for Dummies" exercise (there's a Pascal book somewhere that mentions Twitter? there's a high school that still teaches Pascal?) --- and started asking how something like this had managed to make it to Svbtle.
Then I realized, "oh, it's wp-svbtle, whatever the fuck that is".
This is a design whose entire purpose is to mimic the Svbtle blog network and confuse readers. Every design choice in it, from the duplication of Curtis' (pointless) "Kudos" thingy to the stroke width of the rules, is made not for its own sake but to duplicate the branding of someone else's site.
It's a jerk move all around, not just to Curtis, or to anyone else who has decided to write for Curtis' network, but to readers, who deserve to know at a glance who an author is, or in this case isn't, affiliated with or endorsed by. And because it's an irritatingly obvious jerk move, it does a disservice to the author as well, making their words a sideshow on their own site.
People copying things they like on the internet? Never!
Seriously, what did you expect? You created something beautiful. You formed a visual brand that associated itself to good writing. You made it exclusive.
People wanted in. They copied it. You can see examples of this from nature (animals imitating visual properties of other animals to make themselves more scary etc) to modern design strategy (using similar colors / fonts to create a subconscious mental association with something).
Yes, this is human nature. But... now what? It's still irritating and disrespectful of the reader, the people actually involved with Svbtle, and even of the author's own content, which is obviously not important enough to be posted without a totally unrelated provocation.
If you look carefully at Svbtle or almost any other modern blog, it is not hard to reverse engineer the rules that make these things look good: it's simply font size, line width, leading, and minimal ornamentation. Just make a new blog template that follows the same rules. Leave the "Kudos" thing out while you're at it.
This isn't about sticking up for Dustin Curtis' exclusive rights to minimal, readable blog templates. As approximately every detractor of Svbtle has pointed out approximately always, Svbtle isn't the first site to use minimalist black-on-white breathable sans with a faintly ruled sidebar.
This is about sites going out of their way to pretend an affiliation that they don't have. IBM's blog template is horrible. It would be equally annoying and disrespectful to clone it and change the "IBM" to "IBN".
>mimic the Svbtle blog network and confuse readers
Good, because a "blog network" which is essentially a bunch of blogs with the same look has all the utility of a designer clothing label. Or maybe there is some useful aspect of blogs wearing exclusive uniforms that I'm missing?
This is like saying The Atlantic Monthly is just a bunch of writers wearing the same masthead. It's a critique you could have leveled against any magazine ever started anywhere.
Is there centralized editing/curating that I'm not aware of? Blogrolls and web rings have existed for a long time without the member blogs wearing the same clothes.
A lot of the current svbtle blogs are incredibly vapid.
The current, most popular post on the svbtle network is Dave McClure, a super angel with his own Wikipedia page, hoping that he's a "late bloomer", not a "loser."
dcurtis' latest post:
I’ve been hearing rumblings which suggest that Flipboard is about to be blocked from Twitter’s API, following Instagram’s blockage last week. What is Twitter thinking?
Literally, that's the entire post.
I really like the actual frontend of svbtle blogs, and the 'ideas v. published' blogging interface seems smart, but the notion that this is some curated uber-network is absurd.
I don't need another social network. I don't need ads removed from my current social feed. I don't need app.net.
If twitter died tomorrow something else would pop up. That's the nature of the space. We don't need it and so we go where there is less friction. Ease of use, ease of joining, and ease of finding those I care about most. That's all that matters.
I see App.net becoming something much like svbtle. A highly curated space much like a country club where only those willing to pay the entry fee are allowed in.
Cool.
As long as the data is available publicly through feeds and other api's it won't matter too much. It's still blogging, it's still tweeting, but now your participants have been restricted. Not as much as Svbtle but enough to encourage a certain atmosphere.
The problem with Twitter is that monetization feel like the end instead of the means. Right now, the Twitter of yesterday feels more useful than today's, because Twitter wedge all sorts of banners and ads into everything.
My problem with App.net is that the user payment is only a means to an end no one has explained yet.
I welcome any competition to Twitter to make them step up their game, though, so from a spectator's view, I couldn't be happier to see App.net succeed. As a hypothetical user, the platform holds no appeal to me. I still remember Jaiku, Pownce and Identi.ca.
OK, I understand a bit better now. I do like the idea that I am the customer, not the product and that my data is mine to do with what I please, not something I give away freely.
I guess my only quibble about App.net is that I've never personally seen the appeal of the micro-blogging/twitter social model. I don't like to "follow" people, and I like to say things to other people in more than 140/256 charters. I believe that there is a generally correlation between the length of people's comments/text and their quality.
I would like to see a more integrated real time feed, i.e the music people listen to, the movies they watch, where they eat so that developers can use it to make recommendations to me. That would be awesome as long as I can have fine grained control over who get access to what information.
I am excited to see if App.net is going to go in this direction.
> Once those two companies get their act together and improve their developer programs, the market will quickly loose interest in App.net.
isn't the point that Twitter and Facebook's shitty developer relations are a symptom of their desire to monetise and therefore there is never going to be a time when they have good developer relations?
If your senior high school computer science final project wasn’t building an issue tracker or Twitter clone, then your high school either a) didn’t offer computer science classes or b) you were a jock and didn’t take computer science.
I think this is the first time I've actually been filled with hatred towards a blog post.
Dalton has managed to convince 8000 developers to cough up cash. He's got a working alpha with a high level of community engagement. Those are substantial accomplishments.
God... what? First off, which Pascal textbook would be both old enough to include a floppy disk, yet new enough to include a Twitter clone? I simply don't understand his main argument. App.net will be unsuccessful because it's just a clone of Twitter and people won't support a Twitter clone? App.net is certainly not and will not be a Twitter clone, and anyone who has spent more than five minutes looking at the platform, its roadmap, its API docs, etc., would know that.
Regardless of your opinions on whether or not app.net is a worthwhile endeavor, I think Dalton is proving that the "pay for service" business model still does exist and can be applied to internet services. For so long, the norm was "build service people use for free, get a million users, figure out business model" which inevitably leads to a) selling user info or b) targeting people with ads.
Constantly trashing app.net is not seeing the bigger picture. Thankfully, people like Dalton aren't as short-sighted.
Yeah, I would love for something like App.net to succeed, but unfortunately it probably will not. Even if every developer supported it, its the consumers who always have the last word. Consumers outnumber developers by at least 500:1, and 99 percent of consumers do not care about the issues that developers face. If you don't get consumers (i.e. non-developers) on your platform, it will die (unless of course you are building B2B tools or something).
There isn't really any useful content in that rant to comment about, so I'm going to go off topic a little bit:
"If your senior high school computer science final project wasn’t building an issue tracker or Twitter clone, then your high school either a) didn’t offer computer science classes or b) you were a jock and didn’t take computer science."
Is this really true? My brain immediately turned off when I read this, but then I realized I have no clue what people in high school usually program.
I'll go first: around 14 or 15 I wrote a bytecode compiler for some god awful language that looked like the bastard child of Perl and Javascript... I guess around late high school time I was mainly working on Smogon, a competitive Pokemon website (still around and making money!) and NetBattle, an online simulator for several Pokemon generations (now defunct and replaced by www.pokemonshowdown.com)
So HN, what was your "senior high school project"?
You can't compare something that requires a critical mass to be useful (app.net, Facebook, Twitter) with issue tracking software.
B2B products, like bug trackers, can carve a niche and do rather well with just a few hundred or thousand paid customers. Yes, they're not going to all be Atlassian, but a solo founder charging 1,000 people $30 a month can live very comfortably. And you can drift along for a while and not ultimately give up because "the big guys" are 1000x your size.
B2C products, like app.net, exist on an entirely different plane.
Disclaimer: I run a fairly new project management tool / bug tracker that already has already replaced a considerable amount of my monthly income.
Twitter was crap when it started, something happened which caused it to be useful. App.net is crap, but maybe something useful will come out of it and then we'll find it useful.
I don't know that it's an ad hominem argument because there was no argument made--only an observation.
I didn't realize he was not part of svbtle, but it does seem like he's trying to claim credibility he hasn't earned by styling his blog as if he were a member. Svbtle is new enough that I don't know if there's much associated credibility, but still.
None of this is relevant to his point, which may as well be made as part of a chorus. Lots of people don't see the value.
Hmm, that's a fair argument, but I think there's a difference between "the author isn't actually an part of svbtle" and what the GP said. I understood his implied argument as more like "he shouldn't be criticizing app.net because he ripped off the blog theme".
I didn't realize he was not part of svbtle, but it does seem like he's trying to claim credibility he hasn't earned by styling his blog as if he were a member.
I'm not sure being part of Svbtle lends anyone any "credibility".
What is svbtle in the first place (never even heard of it, and I bet 99% of people haven't either)? Is it a theme? I have no clue why this needs to be mentioned. WHy not just criticize his words?
Svbtle is a blog network. Go to SVBTLE.COM to see who's writing for it; it's the first thing you see on the site.
Whether or not something is part of SVBTLE is about as important a point as whether it's written for Ars Technica, or for ZDNet: that is, not the most important thing about the piece, but by absolutely no means irrelevant.
Also, had this been an actual Svbtle piece, it would have carried the frisson of being a contrarian take on the work of another Svbtle author, since Svbtle is where Dalton Caldwell announced App.net to begin with.
The point isn't that Curtis has a monopoly on thin black strokes and generous leading. The point is that it's not OK to set out with the goal of confusing readers as to whether a blog is or isn't a part of a blog network.
I don't think most people understand that Svbtle is a "blog network" rather than a particular blog engine or even just theme. For a long time I assumed it was just a neat alternative to Wordpress, not an exclusive group of pen pals.
There's a difference between a rip-off and a site that's 'inspired by' another. svbtle is definitely inspired by drawar, but it's much more refined. wp-svbtle is just a plain copy, there's no originality to it.
When Svbtle first launched, as a take on blog authoring software, the originality of the design might have mattered. At the time, I found it especially annoying that people reacted to Curtis' aloof online persona by deliberately cloning his offering in an effort to dilute his work.
But dilution isn't the issue anymore. Curtis won: he's built a real blog network, with many very interesting writers. He's got Dalrymple writing about Mac stuff, Justin Kan from Justin.tv, Dave McClure from 500 Startups, and John Collison from Stripe. It's past time people stopped pretending like we're talking about a page of CSS.
I got halfway down the page, to the part where he appears to have picked a bug tracker project at random to call "me-too" and compare to a "Pascal for Dummies" exercise (there's a Pascal book somewhere that mentions Twitter? there's a high school that still teaches Pascal?) --- and started asking how something like this had managed to make it to Svbtle.
Then I realized, "oh, it's wp-svbtle, whatever the fuck that is".
This is a design whose entire purpose is to mimic the Svbtle blog network and confuse readers. Every design choice in it, from the duplication of Curtis' (pointless) "Kudos" thingy to the stroke width of the rules, is made not for its own sake but to duplicate the branding of someone else's site.
It's a jerk move all around, not just to Curtis, or to anyone else who has decided to write for Curtis' network, but to readers, who deserve to know at a glance who an author is, or in this case isn't, affiliated with or endorsed by. And because it's an irritatingly obvious jerk move, it does a disservice to the author as well, making their words a sideshow on their own site.