App.net is a relatively new social networking platform often compared to Twitter, launched on August 8th 2012 during a successful crowd funding campaign. But there is more to it.

Similar to Twitter, users are able to post short messages, limited to 256 characters, to the service to communicate with others publicly or privately.

What distinguishes App.net from Twitter is, on one hand, that the business model is based on user and developer subscriptions rather than advertisement. On the other hand, the App.net platform is much more flexible. Developers have more creative freedom for the applications and services they can create building up on the platform that App.net provides for them.

Developers even have the possibility to use cloud storage, so any data a user uploads or created can still be contained within the App.net platform and its terms of service, not having to rely on 3rd part solution such as Dropbox or Google Drive. But short messages do not only contain images and 256 characters of text. Depending on the application it is possible to freely attach more information (annotations) to a message, allowing for much richer applications, limited only by the creativity of the developers.

The platform is constantly in development and is improving rapidly. Still the user base with roughly 130.000 accounts is quite small compared to the likes of Facebook or Twitter, but I think the new solutions that keep appearing for App.net have a very unique appeal.

Of course there are “traditional” short message applications such as Kiwi and Felix to be found. But on top of that you can also engage in chat-rooms with Patter, keep a log of all the places you’ve visited with Ohai or just use it App.net as a way to store and share files with applications such as Orbit or Filebase.

Everybody can sign up for a free account (which has certain limitations in terms of online storage and the amount of people you can follow). They are also offering paid user account, that besides lifting some limitations also gives you the ability to vote for the best applications and services for App.net every month. Based on the results the developers of these applications can receive monetary rewards, which could make developing for this platform also more interesting to some developers.

If you want to develop for App.net you have to sign up for a developer account, which is 99 USD per year. The signup is quick and uncomplicated and let’s you get going within minutes. It is also important to say that they seem to value developer very highly which shows in very quick support and the possibility to chat with the App.net team in a special Patter room.