As per the figures quoted by The Venture beat, Caldweel kick started the campaign to with $500,000 goal and is currently sitting at $595,150. And counting, with 31 hours left. The growing interest of the investors in this new venture has left Mark Zuckeberg worrying as Facebook, which was once the winning horse in the social networking world, has its market value equivalent to Yahoo!. Caldwell announced the launch of his website on his own website. If you will visit App.net’s home page, you will see the new venture has 8,894 backers who contributed the almost $600,000, including 58 who signed up for the Pro tier at $1000, which includes developer access, phone support, and a personal meeting with Caldwell. According to Caldwell, App.net is a different kind of social platform. Unlike Facebook, users can’t join for free; they pay $50/year to be the member of App.net. “Like Twitter, users post status updates and follow friends and contacts. But they get a generous 256 characters instead of Twitter’s more parsimonious 140. And the social network itself, the place where all the connection happens, is not the point. Rather, the point is services built on top of the system,” he further said. It was some time ago when Facebook was still becoming popular, Zuckerberg defined Facebook as a “social utility platform” where as told to The Venture Beat, Caldwell is really serious about simply providing electricity, or water, or maybe, more aptly, a dial tone. Most of the cool stuff with bells and whistles and cute puppies in pink will come from the apps.
