Ello is a new minimal social network. Minimal is not always intuitive, and not always the best design for social networks.
In 2009, sites like Facebook surpassed Email usage, but as Ello suggests: “Your social network is run by advertisers.” The ones who won the network game and have attracted nearly 1.3 billion users are advertisers? Maybe.
If the only positive thing to say about Ello is that you haven’t tried it yet, that is not surprising.
Startups like Ello are fun to watch, but not so fun to play around with. Once you become comfortable with their services, their inner-most guts, they change. The process might sound like raising an angry hedgehog. The spectacle of watching invites being sold on Ebay for nearly 50 dollars is astonishing, but sounds like just another piece of information to tag onto a funny site gone viral.
How viral? This chart featured in an Ad Age article about Ello, notes the exponential increase in
The term “slacktivism” has been ironically working extra hard for causes like the Ice Bucket Challenge, and as the numbers show, for novel social networks created by bicycle shop owners in Vermont.
Instead of merely reporting Ello’s success, let’s see if it is warranted. The characteristics we should expect from the site have been broken down into the following sub-headers.
Fun
The option to “Discover” people on Ello is fun and the comments on posts remind this author of early Vimeo days. I don’t see heavy conversations, or a lot of exchange past the Web 2.0 “like” or “favorite”, except with different words: “beautiful”, “wow”, and the sneakier “thumbs up” emoji. Rich commenting, Ello promises, is coming soon to the social network.
The split screen and half-formed nature of Ello isn’t fun. The speculated pay-to-play model that is planned to roll out doesn’t sound fun, or much of an alternative.
The Social Part
A network isn’t much of one without the social element. Remember that Ello is, at the moment, invite-only, even if it can pull 31,000 users an hour. Such a figure isn’t apparent on the site, where only a handful of people can be seen at a time.
Commitments to privacy are not typically upheld by the cloud of social apps and services we have found ourselves cohabiting. So what am I saying here? Maybe that there is more than one social network, and also a market of people who demand an updated and secure web experience. OK, Ello, you win this round.
Zero Ads
The native advertising genius who can use Reddit for paid links isn’t going to turn away from Ello. Not to mention, people will link to sites like Buzzfeed, which are littered with ads, or post images that are stylistically or aesthetically attractive, but contain messages that walk and talk like ads. Ads will either be covert or behind every door, because we’re in 2014 and the ad-scape makes up the face of media.
Content
So now we arrive at the central question: “Ello! Where’s your Content”? Under the Feature list Coming Soon, we should expect more video integration, richer commenting, and author attribution. Why should Ello be the exclusive holder of your YouTube videos? Which is really asking a lot when other hosts have a broader viewership. It would be the equivalent of a lesser known crowd-funding site asking for your campaign, when Kickstarter and Indiegogo have the highest success rates.
Every article on Ello ends the same way. It highlights the possibility of such a platform, the reorientation away from Silicon Valley, and the cool points we should assign such a noble venture. Google+ had (arguably, still has) two out of three of those characteristics but hasn’t become dominant in any sense of the word. Still, we put hope in ventures that spark a conversation and look passionate doing so because we can, or because it defies data and logic.
Facebook is bigger than ever, but its size might be the tipping point, or its Achilles heel. Hopefully, only a few of us will be impacted by such a momentous fall, and by then, we will know where to look for something else.
