Wednesday, January 09, 2013 – 181 views
— by po
This is a shitty first draft of something I was thinking of sticking up on bupk.es
I’d appreciate any feedback.
If anything, I think this is too long and needs stuff cut out.
tl:dr; version is “Get a decent client. Look at global and find interesting conversations and jump in. Be nice. Look who your friends (or interesting people you find on global) are following and talking to, and follow them. Check out the non-twitter-clone stuff at bupk.es”
“OK so you’ve joined app.net – welcome!
Clients
The first thing you’ll probably want to do is get a client.
At the moment, the great majority of mobile clients look like twitter clients – and the same goes for the most popular web apps. Even the basic ‘homepage’ put together by the app.net team (alpha.app.net) looks that way. Although there’s more to app.net than this, you’ll certainly want to start like this I would have thought.
I can’t recommend a client to you– you can have a look at the directory (link) to find one which takes your fancy – and once you get started you’ll probably get lots of recommendations and ideas from other app.net users.
One of the really nice things about app.net, certainly right now, is that the developers of pretty much all of the clients are also active users of the service. So you can contact them directly to ask about their products, make feature requests etc.
Once you’ve got yourself a client you can start posting and meeting people.
Meeting people
Posting to app.net
The most basic form of a post is a text message of up to 256 characters. If you’ve used twitter before you know the drill. There is a lot more to posts than just the text and (thanks to the annotations that can be added to the metadata – we’ll look at that later) but a basic text post is a good place to start.
When you make a public post, it’ll show up in the feeds of anyone following you, and also in search results if someone’s looking for one of the words you’ve posted (we’ll look at a couple of search tools later). It will also be seen by anyone looking at the ‘Global Feed’ – this is an aggregation of all of the public posts being made on app.net*. Global can be accessed by most clients, and also at alpha.app.net/global/(link).
First steps
Most people start with a basic “Hello World” post or similar. There’s a good chance that someone will see your post in Global and reply. These are nice people.
Obviously you can carry on just posting into the void… but let’s just imagine that you would like a bit of engagement and interaction, now you’ve paid for a new social service!
One thing a lot of people do first is try and find their existing twitter friends here – you’ve spent all that time and energy building up those relationships, after all. There are tools to do that (in fact you were probably directed to a couple of those during the joining process).
Bear in mind that a lot of people may have signed up for an app.net account, but aren’t using it – you might find that some of the ‘twitter-famous’ people you follow to begin with don’t actually post all that much (they might have signed up mainly to reserve their username, or just to show support for the project) – so it’s definitely worth finding yourself some new people on app.net too.
You might also find that some people ‘cross-post’ a lot of the same content across networks, so you’ll have to decide how to deal with that duplication in your feeds (if you’d like to try cross-posting I’d recommend @phuu’s tool, app.phuu.net). Once you’ve found a few people you know you can check out who they’re following and see if any of those people look interesting.
Technically speaking you don’t actually need to follow anyone, or to have any followers, to have an active and social experience on app.net. Certainly at the moment there is a culture of openness which means that it’s perfectly acceptable to just browse the global stream and jump into conversations with strangers. That’s the way that lots of new users are meeting people.
You might also want to try and find some brand new people. There are a few things you could try.
Finding other new users
· recentusers.com shows a list of the most recently-opened app.net accounts, with their profile info and their first post (if any) – if I’m in the mood to meet and greet a newcomer, this is where I go. You could use it to find others who are also just starting out
· appnetizens also has a tool to see who the newest people are.
· The @welcome account follows new users as soon as they join, so if you look at the last few people it followed, they will be other new users
People search
If you want to find people from the same area as you, or with similar interests, you could try a people search.
My go-to tool for this adn.nanek.net – it searches the text of posts but also within users’ profile information. You could also try search.256.is”
Other ideas – page of groups – ie hashtag groups, patter rooms, mndp etc
talk about threading? (that's on the main bupk.es page)
is there really that much to say? would be interesting to know what the main sticking points have been for recent new joiners. in terms of resources, there doesn't seem to me to be that much to know, really. what do you think?
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