Hipster, freshly minted from college, still bankrolled by mom and dad, has an original idea and decides to build a startup. Three months in has revelation that productivity is stalling because issue tracking software doesn’t fit personal preferences and decides to write one.
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. The Twitter clone and issue tracker are examples of ubiquitous software projects that would likely be on the floppy disk included in my “Pascal for Dummies” text book.
Take Bug.ly for example, it is a relatively new entry into the world of issue trackers and one that is destined to remain a small project until it fails and the author moves on. Why? Because the market for issue trackers is saturated and his me-too implementation just can’t possibly improve in areas that matter enough to sway people away from the bigger players. Big players like Atlassian with 20,000 companies using their product and millions bankrolling their much larger team of developers who’ve been working on this product long before the Bug.ly guy decided to compete.
This brings me to App.net which I’ve written about before and is facing the same problem of trying to create a niche by solving a problem that just doesn’t cause enough pain for the majority of his market. Dalton claims that developers are frustrated with Facebook and Twitter’s ad revenue driven platforms that don’t do enough to cater toward developers. He is right, and there are plenty of examples of the pain that goes with trying to build on those platforms, but there just isn’t enough pain to support a completely new product like App.net.
App.net’s current appeal touches more on the anger in the developer community toward Twitter and Facebook and less on the need for another social platform. Once those two companies get their act together and improve their developer programs, the market will quickly loose interest in App.net.
Note: while I am giving App.net a bad wrap, I did contribute $50 to the program. I want to believe.
15 replies on “App.net, like I need another bug tracker”
You will be happy to see what me and a collective of startups are working on. Kickstarter and viral campaign coming soon…Would like your contact information.
It’s still not as bad as styling your blog to pretend your part of the svbtle network.
Touche.
Yeah, I though this site was part of the svbtle network until I saw your comment.
Go complain to the hundreds of users using https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque
really? it’s just a nice looking theme, almost entirely whitespace. there’s hardly anything unique or special about it, perhaps the author just liked how it looked?
Dies Svbtle actually have any network functionality, or is it just an aesethic… the blog equivalent of designer clothes?
Have you actually been to http://svtble.com/ or are you just trying to troll or something?
I see a list of links. Is that the “network”functionality”? A list of links to blogs that look the same?
“Once those two companies get their act together and improve their developer programs” . Highly unlikely this will happen.
Bug.ly looks good. Anyway it’s not about clone or yet another me-too app. It’s about choice in the perspective of a user. Would you rather be another pair of eyeballs that enrich VCs. Dalton sold us his best argument. We can’t really blame the developer team behind VC backed apps. They are working real hard to connect the dots, satisfying both party, users and the VCs. But well, it’s extremely hard to make money when your app is free without turning your users into advertising potentials. Let’s hope good things shine. I expect the unexpected outcome.
“less on the need for another social platform” – right because security and trust are so not important to people.
Thanks for introducing me to bug.ly! I’ve been looking at dozens of project management and bug tracker app and from the screenshots on bug.ly, it looks like it fits my requirements.
“the market for issue trackers is saturated and his me-too implementation just can’t possibly improve in areas that matter enough to sway people away from the bigger players.”
That’s an unproved thesis, Trello [0] could be a sufficiently successful product to use against it 😉
[0] https://trello.com/