Ballparking Ello's active user statistics
ello.co
ello.co
Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice for long blog posts?
I also disagree with many of Ello's styling decisions (and G+'s for that matter). My Ello CSS revise: http://stylebot.me/styles/9519
(That only works on logged-in sessions, unauthenticated still uses the earlier Ello v1 style.)
I had never heard of it before this post.
Ello's got at least that many daily actives, and about 200k monthlies. That's much larger than Facebook's founding class, though also a different mix.
It's also worth realizing that many influential online communities were very small relative to their impact. The WELL and Usenet had core userbases in the tens of thousands of users, best I can make out.
I'd chalk Ello's exposure up to a few factors. One was the whole "David vs. Goliath" meme that struck when Ello was first revealed. World+dog are trying to figure out how to take on Facebook, and that's how the story was pitched. Ello's leadership makes quite clear that's not their take on things. Another was that, at least for a time, Ello had attracted quite the credible crowd. Clay Shirky, Charlie Stross, Bruce Sterling Paul Mason (UK/BBC journalist), Quinn Norton, Meredith Patterson, Tim Bray, danah boyd, Jonathan Zittrain, and others all created accounts, some posted for a while, a few still do.
It was too early. I've posted a few long lists of features Ello desperately needed to be viable, and lack of those, along with various bugs, were really hampering it.
While it's still got some technical shortcomings, the team's been addressing them quickly, doing a good job of it, and surprising me with some quite ingenious (and not always technical) solutions to problems or ways of offering capabilities. And they've directly addressed most of my major issues. That responsiveness has been notably missing at Google.
The site also has quite the creative set present, which tends to be a good early adopter set -- think artist colony.
But technical features and a cool vibe aren't enough. Though they're a good start. I'm encouraged by the feature set, community, leadership, direction, and foundations. Rather more so than by a few other systems -- G+ was already faltering badly in its first months out of the gate, Ello's avoided those faux pax entirely.
I'm also getting some sense of the HN effect: a front-page placement seems to be good for about 3.5k hits in 3 hours or so, based on this item.
You can't compare user activity/behavior in 2015 with user activity/behavior in 2004.
My point isn't that Ello will clobber FB. That's not the stated goal of its founders. But a modest initial community can grow. The selection of the early adopter class is far more important than its size.
Unlike the Facebook/Myspace era, social networks are a dime a dozen, with most receiving a little traction and news articles, and then dying soon after. You could use the same arguments you've presented for the inevitable "success" of Google+, and look what happened there.
Now I have more followers on Instagram and it's like... whatever, it's a drop in the bucket.
Do you have any sources on that?
I can attest to a lot of early-user attrition. But also lots of new users. Churn's part of the game.
If we are making comparisons with TheFacebook early days, we have to look at different data, that set apart TheFacebook from competitors then: K factor, session length, various engagement metrics of individual user. But they are not discussed in this post, so we can not draw such comparisons. From data that we do have, Ello doesn't seem to be any close to TheFacebook than to any of those thousands of perished start-ups.
Beyond that, there was a rather large social media "landgrab" when Ello first hit mainstream circles where popular social media personalities claimed both accounts with their usual pseudonyms and also the pseudonyms of friends and rivals (as both jokes and pranks).
Both sources of growth don't seem sustainable, has there been any organic community growth from within Ello from either one of those groups? That would be a much stronger indicator of future success to me than a comparison with 2004 Facebook.
No, I don't. Just one of the early (Sept., 2014) adopters.
The analysis I'm presenting of Ello activity, as my earlier G+ analysis, is based entirely on publicly visible characteristics and my inferences based on them.
I did join Ello during the genderqueer rush, though that's not a community I identify with. My comments at the time were along the lines of "artists and drag queens is as good a foundation community as any". Influence of the group as a whole seems to have leveled off a bit, though Ello's currently celebrating Pride, with a post on that topic from Paul Budnitz today:
https://ello.co/budnitz/post/mnwJqqER_ieTA6qe4YzV8w
And yes, a lot of notables grabbed their Ello seats, a few spoof accounts were set up (the Zuckerberg one may still be active).
I don't have any access to user numbers and haven't looked into building those, though the Ello crew have talked of growth and a few notable spurts. As I've noted elsewhere in this thread, I've seen both a lot of attrition of early accounts and new arrivals. I noted the same trend on G+ (and did a major housecleaning at one point of long-dead profiles from my circles there).
The FB comparison has far more to do with what that group represented than how large it was. Dynamics of online community growth (and decline) are fascinating -- I've been watching online communities develop, grow, and decline for nearly 30 years. Harvard students (or grads) are an attractive social cohort, it's an easy base to grow if you play your cards right. That was FB's strength. Now it's the overall size of the social graph, but they're vulnerable to defections and evaporative cooling effects given that, by definition, most members aren't high-social-status:
http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
Colleges and creatives make good seeds, though they're not perfect. Balancing out traits within communities helps a lot -- e.g., geeks can be level-headed and realistic, but may lack enthusiasm or interpersonal engagement other groups can bring (I generally identify geek myself). Finding and cultivating the righ mix is an art, but it can be exceptionally powerful.
That from a HN post, by way of comments at Ello:
I like the premise of Ello, but it's metrics and user-engagement figures are not promising.
Actually, for the life of me, I struggle anytime I login to Ello and have to hunt for how to logout. The half page banner (some translucent stuff to scroll through) of whatever on top doesn't make things easier to know about either. The whole UI is completely unintuitive, quite bland and too minimalistic to figure things out. So I stopped checking it several months ago. The privacy part is very nice and very welcome, because of which I had a lot of hope on the platform. But Ello was (or probably still is) nowhere close to Facebook or Google+ in terms of UI and usability. Try pushing a novice user from either of the big platforms into Ello and watch the person struggle. One's social graph being in some other walled garden is just one piece of the problem in trying to move users to something else. But that something else needs to be an intuitive and viable alternative in the first place.
P.S.: I'm not a tech newbie.
P.P.S.: I try to push people I know to better (if not the best) platforms and services when it comes to privacy.
"I'm not a tech newbie." <-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery" of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and frustrating.
I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to experiment and be different.
I do tend to agree that the interface is a tad _too_ minimal. Tooltips have recently been added.
Arguably, Ello misuses the hamburger as well.
Behind the scenes though, the styling's very clean. Icons are all SVG and could be resized (or re-coloured) with a CSS tweak. CSS and HTML are both quite clean, and restyling the site (I do it for my own use) is trivial.
Some small-sample usability testing likely would be a really good idea.
Holding up G+ as a paragon of UI design jars with me. There is _so_ much wrong with that site. And its guts are a goddamned disaster (Closure's CSS minification hashing is a crime against humanity).
Also, I suspect that the release of mobile apps (supposedly this spring) will be a huge boost for them. I know that I would be checking in on activity there much more if I could do it on my phone.