For most people ADN is yesterday’s news. It’s considered as dead as the dodo. However there’s actually still a pretty good community going on there. As people have noted the signal to noise ratio has gone up quite a bit. Unfortunately the people who run ADN don’t seem to share the hope that some of the continuing users have. Which makes it a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know a few people with innovative clients there aren’t finishing because it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
The best hope for ADN is for some other company like DropBox to make a competitor that uses ADN’s excellent APIs. Even the critics of ADN and its management always acknowledged that in terms of actual engineering it was an amazingly well designed system.
Personally I think it’d make an excellent match with DropBox. They are finding themselves squeezed by Google, Microsoft and Apple who all now have cloud drives now. DropBox’s one hope of differentiating themselves is to offer more services. Right now they have a lot of inertia because few indie developers really support Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive well. Apple’s iOS8 version of iCloud finally gets a DropBox like service and Apple’s been pushing numerous additional services. However Apple doesn’t have open APIs. Basically to use Apple’s services you have to have an app in the App Store. If you are doing Android or in most cases a web client you’re out of luck. Since DropBox was first, most apps support DropBox. For instance 1Password supports DropBox and iCloud but has no offering for OneDrive or GoogleDrive. This is hardly unique.
One of the great things about ADN that perhaps wasn’t as well marketed was the timeline as a service. This let people create private chat systems or private chat. You could also use it as a way of displaying images in a very easy timeline fashion. It seems the sort of thing that DropBox should want to offer to developers. Plus, given the prominence of DropBox as a company, there would be far less fear by developers in using it.
Will they? I see no evidence of it. Which is sad. As I said there was a lot done by ADN that was extremely innovative. By the end it had the feel of a classic forum
One of the great things about ADN that perhaps wasn’t as well marketed was the timeline as a service. This let people create private chat systems or private chat. You could also use it as a way of displaying images in a very easy timeline fashion. It seems the sort of thing that DropBox should want to offer to developers. Plus, given the prominence of DropBox as a company, there would be far less fear by developers in using it.
Will they? I see no evidence of it. Which is sad. As I said there was a lot done by ADN that was extremely innovative. By the end it had the feel of a classic forum from around the time of the millennium1 but with the huge advantage that you pick who you follow. Unfortunately by putting too much of the user interface in the hands of 3rd party developers they couldn’t push unique features.2 One obvious thing that any replacement of ADN should do is make it more easily to turn conversations on or off and come back to them later. Really the biggest advantage of ADN is the conversational nature of it. I hope someone else picks that up. Because frankly, Twitter sucks for most things outside of being a social rss type of feed.
- For you young kids, you don’t know what it was. I was a regular on the ARS forums back then and what’s available on ARS now is a pale shadow of what was around then. ↩
- Too be fair, as with Twitter in the early days, many innovative features came out of 3rd party developer work. There was a ton of innovation on ADN that I think many who saw it as a Twitter clone simply never recognized. ↩