App.net’s Dalton Caldwell Turned Down A Facebook Acqui-Hire Offer Before Rebooting His Company
Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More So here’s the real story behind App.net founder Dalton Caldwell’s plans to build a new, open API framework for developers to build off of. According to him, Facebook pressured him into selling his company, rather than competing with the social network’s newly released App Center. In an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted to his blog on Wednesday, Caldwell recounted his side of a meeting with Facebook’s developer relations team, which occurred in mid-June. Prior to the meeting, App.net was working on a mobile app that would let users see which apps their friends were using, and make suggestions about new apps to download. It used Facebook Connect and Facebook Open Graph to identify interesting apps and to share them with social connections, and Cald...