The Advantage of App.Net

Steve Streza: “One other cool benefit of using App.net for the backend is that the data specification is publicly available. This means other developers could build apps that recognize your journal. So, if the developer of your favorite camera app adds support for Ohai journals, they could save those photos into your journal. Then, the next time you open Ohai, those photos are available. Other developers could build journaling apps for other platforms like Android, or even write competitive apps for iPhone. You as the user would not have to export your data and re-import it; it would just all appear when you logged in. It’s a wonderful deal for customers to have no lock-in at all, with open data standards for interoperability.”

Ohai, Steve’s new app, is an app for keeping track of life moments. Similar to Vesper, from Q Branch, but this application has storage in the magical cloud. Not only does it make use of cloud technologies it’s using App.Net to do it. I think this is important because most people think of App.Net as a Twitter clone. It’s way more than that. It’s a set of API’s and infrastructure that allow people to build deeply connected applications. App.Net, the social network, is one example of the infrastructure and API’s. Ohai is another. Steve even points out that others could create other applications that can have access to the data. Why? Well, it’s your data. You decide who gets to see it.

Very cool app.