App.net Gives Mobile App Makers an Instant Web Presence

**Waqas** · August 30, 2011

“There’s a huge mismatch between apps and the web,” says Dalton Caldwell, co-founder of Mixed Media Labs. Caldwell’s current project, App.net, seeks to bridge this gap and is expanding to support three additional mobile platforms Tuesday.

App.net consists of a suite of tools mobile developers can use to create an attractive, social media-optimized and SEO-friendly web presence — including landing pages, third-party integrations and download widgets — for their applications.

First released for iOS and Android developers, App.net has updated to support developers with Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry and HTML5 apps. Developers can use App.net free of a charge for a single application or pay a monthly fee for additional apps and features.

“Our WP7 and BlackBerry support works in the same way as iOS and Android,” a blog post on the update details.

As for HTML5, App.net should come in handy for developers who optimize for mobile. “Marketing a link that launches directly into full screen mode from a tweet or email link may not the best user experience,” the post says. “You still need a marketing/landing page to explain to people why they would want it.”

App.net is like an About.me for apps, Caldwell explains. “You don’t have to know how to program,” he adds. “Now, you can just take for granted that there’s a web page for your app … App.net provides a way to canonically refer to applications on the web.”

App.net, Mixed Media Lab’s second product, became the top priority for the Andreessen-Horowitz-backed startup after Caldwell realized that the mobile application tools his company had built for internal usage could turn into a more lucrative business than mobile photo-sharing. As a result, Picplz was spun out as a standalone company and Mixed Media Labs turned its attention to App.net.

“I know the mobile app space pretty well,” explains Caldwell on the switch in focus. “I’m just trying to leverage all the knowledge I have and solve the biggest challenges people face — specifically distribution and awareness.”

Caldwell is a proponent of the two week dev cycle and says that Mixed Media Labs will continue to push out regular updates for the App.net platform. “We’re just going down the list of all the things that should work,” he says.