Ello: an ad-free social network
ello.co
ello.co
I don't think they'll be making it. I can't count the projects anymore that tried to be a "better facebook" or "better whatsapp". The harsh truth ist: people simply don't care. The number of people caring enough about their privacy to move to another social network just because of that (that seems to be ellos single selling point) is very very small. It will only be a couple of hipsters showing off how cool and different they are. In a couple of weeks, nobody will talk about ello anymore.
Its a bit sad but thats how it is. Just look at all the other approaches that have failed already. Even app.net that had a lot of media coverage failed in the end because people just don't care. Even the oh-my-god-we-are-so-awesome-and-invite-only trick won't do it for them if they don't satisfy a very strong need for the users - and they don't; because there is none.
Maybe I'm making perfect the enemy of good, but I won't be 'pushing' my friends to move to anything other than textsecure. Unfortunately the iPhone version is a long time coming (and necessary for a switch in my friend group), and I'm becoming doubtful that it will ever arrive.
I don't want to force my friend group to switch only to have to learn the lesson all over again. I prefer an open-source, end-to-end solution with a lot of eyes on it.
http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta...
So maybe in the future, some other social network will emerge.
I'm not sure how true that is although I hear it all the time. I think young people are using more social networks (Snapchat, WhatsApp) but that doesn't mean they've stopped using Facebook. My younger brother and his friends spend most of their time on their phone on Facebook.
When Facebook became available to high school students in 2005, teens flocked to it because it was a novelty, it was one of the few games in town, and it was, for many, a superior alternative to MySpace, which, for most, had become a garish nightmare of animated GIFs and auto-playing music widgets.
Today, there are so many options available that teens have little reason to use Facebook. They aren't as concerned with maintaining old friendships as adults or twenty-somethings because, well, they don't have many old friendships. They see, on a daily basis, almost everyone they know and have ever known, and for those they don't see, Snapchat serves just fine. For now.
As people get older, staying in touch and recording memories feels increasingly important. Facebook, a sort of nostalgia machine, is much better at capturing that kind of coherent narrative than, say, Instagram, and so people naturally migrate there as they leave college and lose touch.
I'd love to see a study that tracks social network usage from age 12 to age 25. My bet, which is obviously informed by a the kind of anecdotes you're gesturing to above, is that you'd see higher usage of "ephemeral"-type social networks in the early years (because young kids can't see past their noses and have relatively few memories) that tracks inversely with usage of networks whose content has longer-term value as time passes.
I agree, but think this misses the point. I'm not "that much into" voice telephone calls, but I still rely on them and wouldn't purchase a cell phone that couldn't make them. I'm also not willing to switch to a different method of making voice calls, even if it has substantial improvements, if I have to get all my friends and family to also switch to be able to use the service.
> Ello is completely free to use.
> From time to time we offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you like, you can choose to pay a very small amount of money to add it to your Ello account forever.
> The vast majority of Ello's features, the ones that all of us use every day, are always going to be free, and we'll keep improving them. When you choose to pay a small amount of money for a feature that you get to use, you help support Ello as an ad-free network and help us make it better and better.
-- https://ello.co/wtf/post/why-no-ads
That sounds like an okay business model to me. Depends what features will be paid and which will be free, but given the motivation behind creating the site in the first place, it'll probably be reasonable.
It most likely won't work.
They have recurrent expenses associated with running a service, but they plan to support it with one-time fees. This has an absolutely uncertain scalability profile. At some point their existing user base will get all the features they need and stop paying, meaning that they will need to rely on acquiring new users for revenue, which in turn will lead to higher expenses. And this starts to look as a classic pyramid scheme to me (without even considering things like salaries and dividends).
Alternatively they can try harder to entice people to buy into the features, but this would mean artificially restricting functionality, castrating the free feature set, etc. I guess if they got enough momentum, they can get away with it, but in the end it's not that much better than an ad-based model.
2) The design (no offense to whoever made it) is a bit weird. Monospaced font?
3) The part where you click on the arrow (on the right of the page). It isn't clear what that is about. It is 'invite only' but they want you to submit a photo? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wx88cyg0lh3u5j8/Screenshot%202014-...)
4) and the profiles do look (again no offense) like a crappy tumblr blog (with a touch of instagram, which IMO isn't really a social network (no messaging, it is just a fancy photo gallery site. No one would call flickr a social networking site). Maybe thats the kind of audience they are going after... but it looks a bit amateurish. Whereas facebook, linkedin, even twitter all look a lot more fine tuned.
5) But profiles seem to be able to have direct outgoing links (no nofollow, which will encourage spam a little bit), so if it wasn't invite only it would get filled up with spam quickly.
If they want everyone, then it will surely fail. Everyone has Facebook already where their friends and family dwell, and no-one seriously care much about the NSA (I have nothing to hide!) or that they are the product (people have come to be tamed and accept ads as a normality of life).
They should probably target a particular audience, like linked in targets professionals, from what I see, Ello should maybe target designers and creatives.
Why should there be only one 'social network'?
I'd love a software developer social network where I can make friends, share some code that would be rendered nicely on screen, have conversations that can be private or public, ask questions that would otherwise be closed on SO, etc Same for electronics hobbyists, graphic designers, photographers, ...
Facebook is the lowest common denominator, but it excels at no particular task: why can't we belong to multiple social networks, each geared toward something that is central to our life?
I seriously care much about having my private communication snooped on. I'm someone.
I hate ads, I'd prefer to pay a social network so that I do not have to see ads.
> They should probably target a particular audience
> Why should there be only one 'social network'?
A better question is, why do you think that multiple social networks must serve niches? Why can't they all compete for the same pie just like in practically all areas of commerce? Are you saying that I should only get my full-fat milk from company A, my semi-skinned from company B, and my butter-milk from company C? Because that's what it sounds like. You wouldn't tolerate that in other areas of your life, why are you unconcerned about it when it comes to something so personal -- your social communication and its history?
Also I agree that competition is a good thing here but a social network that's trying to connect me to everyone like Facebook is going to face serious network effects obviously, and it'll be seriously hard to become useful for that purpose.
You answered your own question. Some of us can't afford to throw down several dollars a month on a social network. The free tier is unacceptably restrictive. Or was the last time I thought about it.
However, being a pragmatist, I also see that FB has won a particular war: it managed to get everyone and their mom on it, and privacy issues are not enough to persuade 'the masses' to move to another platform. Proof being that almost no-one has left FB and that other social networks like App.Net, with all their marketing might, have failed to capture any relevant share.
For a competitor to succeed, it would have to offer something vastly more tangible to the masses to persuade them to swith. Google tried and failed, Microsoft tried and failed, countless others tried an failed.
FB had it relatively easy compared to anyone entering the market now: there was no real social network when FB started. Of course, there was MySpace, and a few smaller competitors, but almost no-one was on social apart from a few early adopters. Now, outside of China and probably Iran, practically everyone with a phone or a computer is on FB.
Offering just another FB-clone with a nicer design is not going to make people switch. Unless there is a killer feature, practically no-one apart from a few of us in technology are going to quit FB. People have their lives invested in FB: it's where they announced their weddings, their first child, where they shared tons of pictures with friends and family. It would take a lot for them to move en masse somewhere else.
All I'm saying is that instead of attacking FB frontally, these new social networks should target smaller, more focused, markets, if only because there is a need for better experiences for people who are passionate about something.
That analogy with milk is a bit weak if I may say. A slightly better one would be to compare social networks to newspapers and magazines. FB is like your local newspaper, full of a bit of everything. Now if I want to get science news, I'd rather pick-up Scientific American or Nature.
There shouldn't be just one social network, that's my whole point. I don't want another FB, I want others networks where I can share and exchange with other people who share a similar driving interest.
The problem with social networks is that there are thousands. For every possible thing. And some are already very good at what they do. People should try to find new ideas. New business models. Things that actually solve a problem we have. A new Facebook is useless IMO.
Let's talk about privacy. Having nothing to hide is not a good reason to just ignore our right to privacy. The day you have something to hide, you won't be able to hide it any more. Also, this gives the government ways to pressure you should they want to because they have everything they need. For instance, imagine you want to create a political party someday? Well, forget it, if the government knows every single thing about you: they'll probably pressure you or disclose things to break you.
But sadly, few people think about privacy this way and prefer to use Google to DuckDuckGo, Gmail to Fastmail, YouTube to Vimeo, Facebook to Diaspora, etc.
The site has a vague privacy policy of sorts related to its Google Analytics, but that doesn't have anything to do with the data that I would actually upload and store on the site for 'social networking' purposes.
Also the site itself feels very overproduced; back button is broken et cetera.
I agree completely with the criticism of other services in the "manifesto," but nothing about the site suggests its a viable alternative.
I wish them good luck but I have major doubts.
Personally, I think I'll stick with #pants, a light-weight blogging engine coming with a fully decentralized social network built-in. It's free, fully open-source, and embraces the principles of the IndieWeb movement, which I think is a great idea.
Full disclosure: built by my best friend. Other than that, I'm unbiased.
Cool, where is the (open)-source ?
https://github.com/modeset/teaspoon for instance.
One of the most annoying things you can ever do to me as a user.
I don't see "lack of ads" as particularly craved by users. My wife actively wants to see ads (to the suffering of my credit card). Unless they find something else to latch on to, this will end up being yet another also-ran social.
I am not sure about ello myself, but it seems worth a try for me as a non-facebook-user. Esp. because of the things statet in ellos manifesto. i maybe able to judge in a few weeks.
I would have apprecheated, if ello comes from europe or southamerika because people outside the US (i live in germany) are fed up with the "american-way" of running things, which facebook is an characteristical case for.
Yeah. Ok. Great, thanks for changing the world.