'Anti-Facebook' platform Ello attracts thousands

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29409541

by petethomas • 12 years ago

50 76 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

thefreeman• 12 years ago

Has anyone actually used this? It was posted to HN the other day and didn't not seem to receive positive feedback.

Most of the users profiles I have clicked on seem pretty boring. I fail to see what is so attractive about it.

I definitely am taking the owners claim of "31,000 requests an hour" with a grain of salt.

Honestly, does the average person even care about being advertised to, or having their data mined? I have never heard anyone outside of tech circles even talk about it.

xnull2guest7• 12 years ago

The people I talk to outside of tech circles care very muhc about privacy and having their data sold. But it's one dimensional to think about the average person when talking about Ello, or any other service. Why can't Ello just be a service for the not-average people who do care about their privacy?

cwilson2• 12 years ago

I've had the opposite experience. The only reason anyone I know has signed up for Ello outside of the tech world is because they saw someone else sign up and don't want to miss out on something potentially cool. That's it.

robryan2• 12 years ago

I think it is very hard to have a social network that appeals to a limited subset but to have enough of any one collection of people to make communicating on there worth their time.

Just have a look at Google+, millions of people gave that a try but in the end only a very limited number of those formed enough connections to justify primarily sharing things on there.

The question then really is, if there is enough of these niche groups that will provide enough user retention to make the economics work. There has been plenty of things written regarding app development and the difficulties in supporting recurring costs with one time fees. I suspect you would need a pretty significant userbase to support even a small team on cheap one time feature purchases.

kemayo• 12 years ago

I've tried it. It seems okay. It's closer to twitter than to Facebook. It interests me enough that I'll give it a fair shot at being used.

cwilson2• 12 years ago

It's a social network based on two promises:

1. It's beautiful, which they had to add because they knew just saying "we won't sell your data" would not go far enough. They needed that extra edge. In my humble opinion, it's actually quite ugly, so I find it pretty funny they are advertising this as a selling point.

2. They don't sell your data. We all know this is flawed because there is no promise this won't happen in the future, and to boot MOST normal people do not care about this.

Their initial launch had the right elements that allowed it to go viral and non-technical people started signing up. I would LOVE to see some stats from the Ello team around retention, as I am willing to bet a large sum of money that stat is really bad.

dceddia• 12 years ago

In regards to selling your data, apparently they've taken at least a bit of venture capital, so it's probably a realistic worry in the future...

https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/

faizmokhtar• 12 years ago

Agreed. To me, the UI is not that beautiful. Heck, it's ugly to be honest. Not to mention it's buggy.

icelancer• 12 years ago

They should escrow a few million in a bank somewhere, and if the data has been deemed to be sold to anyone (judged by a third-party neutral arbitrator), the money is donated to the EFF. Then we'll see who is really serious about their promises.

krenoten2• 12 years ago

31k/hr is < 9/s, and yet apparently it's been having issues scaling. Other social networks have started with similar ambitions of never showing ads, gotten investors and punt on monetization as they "perfect the product". If they don't collapse, they either go freemium and segment the userbase or provide all users the same features and support this by showing ads.

It's a nice idea but no for-profit has figured it out yet. Diaspora accomplishes it but lacks the most valuable asset a social network could have, which is a large userbase.

jdp23• 12 years ago

Yes, I've got an account there. For me, the early days of a social network are often very enjoyable -- lots of interesting people trying things out. The UI's not my favorite style and is a bit quirky but you can certainly have good conversations (at least on a computer; the mobile interface needs work).

As for what's attractive about it: it's not Facebook. People are ready for something different. I noticed more and more people talking about time spent on Facebook the way they talk about time watching bad TV or eating junk food ... plus, in my experience, most people really do find Facebook's ads irritating. Plus for a chunk of people, the "real names" issue is a big deal; and this follows the stuff about Facebook's emotional manipulation experiments.

Of course that doesn't mean that Ello's the answer to what people are hoping for; it's too early to tell how successful it will be. But I certainly believe they were getting 31,000 requests for invites an hour. Even if they were at level for 3 days straight at that level is only 2 million people -- a tiny portion of Facebook's english-speaking population.

ericcumbee• 12 years ago

From my observation it is only an issue, when they surface a new feature or start doing something that at first seems creepy. But then people adjust to it and think nothing of it.

woah2• 12 years ago

Earlier last week, Ello was blowing up all over my Facebook feed. Mostly seemed to be a crowd that were tech-savvy enough to see the evil of Facebook's ways, but not knowledgeable enough to know that Ello is the exact same thing.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

I've got my own account (https://ello.co/dredmorbius), and actually rather like the asthetic (though I've styled it a bit as I'm wont to do). The bones are _vastly_ better than G+, and a number of the features (Shift+[015] UI toggles) are actually pretty good.

A lot of bits are breaking, falling off, getting fixed, and getting added, so it's rather much in flux.

The clue factor is high, though one of my first observations is that one of the adventures of new discussion sites is rediscovering all the people you'd found annoying elsewhere and blocked.

It shines in some areas, lacks in others, the privacy, ads, and funding questions are very much open, but I think it's got a good start.

zorpner• 12 years ago

Andy Baio wrote a small piece exploring Ello's funding and hypothesizing that their bluster about not selling your data/running ads is worth about as much as Livejournal's was: https://ello.co/waxpancake/post/oy73kFfDdhOPh8Jv9z9pFA

xnull2guest7• 12 years ago

Yeah one of the problems with Ello is that there's no real guarantee that they won't eventually start selling/mining/advertizing or that they won't be bought by a company that will.

Diaspora had the right philosophy.

post_break• 12 years ago

I can't help but think of the arrested development scene. "Dozens, there are dozens of us!" It's like the cool party, if everyone goes it's like Project X, if only a few go, it's not a party. I want what Facebook used to be, no bs, just friends.

moloch• 12 years ago

Only a few hundred million more and they'll be close to Facebook's user-base!

xnull2guest7• 12 years ago

Everyone has to start from a few members. Isn't it more interesting to analyze services based on their features, anyway?

jlebar• 12 years ago

Along the same vein, I couldn't help but think "What is this, a social network for hipsters??"

mgkimsal• 12 years ago

"We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life."

So... what if some of my "connecting" and "creating" is viewed by some as deception or coercion? Eye of the beholder and all that...

Certainly FB is a lot of data mining to sell ads, but I also see plenty of people connecting with family, creating groups and communities and communicating and growing... and they didn't need some monospaced hipsterific platform to do it.

xnull2guest7• 12 years ago

Reprising and modifying an old comment from another account:

The latest trends in advertising has moved beyond 'behavioral' targeted advertising, where a user is served specific content because they may have browsed something similar in the past.

The new trend is to use social networking models to discover 'influencers' in social groups and use those people's reputations to recommend products to other people. The diagrams (a) and (b) on page nine of the following research paper is a crude example: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4327v1.pdf

Lindex 'Enterprise SEO Software' has this to say: "Our latest innovation Linkdex Networks enables you to visualise and analyse these groups of relevant influencers. The objective is to enable digital marketers to gradually identify the right personalities and build relationships with them, spreading along those networks for maximum exposure. If someone within your network has lots of relationships pointing to them you know that they are perceived as trustworthy sources. The aim is to find influencers who are passionate on a niche topic, have strong relationships with the group and are receptive to new ideas with plenty of reach." [1]

It's on fire everywhere in marketing and advertising and there are lots of variations being tried and tested at the moment, and also publicly funded research at universities [2]. Marketers will drop prices online when they detect influencers, in an attempt to encourage them to speak highly of their product to their friends and family (who will need to buy at full price). The Marketing Science Institute has a whole section dedicated to social networks and influencing them [3][4].

Just searching for the term "social contagion advertising" or "advertising influencers" reveals media research arms with nifty tables that map out ways of influencing social groups by targeting information strategically at certain members. For example you can get people to change their view of the "legitimacy of an item" by "encourag[ing] influential targets to adopt the item" or create the idea of a "status disadvantage of not adopting" by "Emphasiz[ing] activities of close connections in a social network to influence behavior". [5]

Perhaps a side note, but the DoD "MINERVA initiative" [6] studies social contagion strategies to track, create or lessen political instability in other countries (although the initiative studies a lot of other things too). The USAID Cuban Twitter project sought to (and nearly succeeded in) creating mass unrest by appearing to be a grassroots movement on Twitter in Cuba seeking the overthrow of the government. Snowden documents and leaked HB Gary memos show that both the NSA and GCHQ engage in astroturfing and social media manipulation [7][8][9]. The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target selection). You can bet - although direct proof is forthcoming - that other countries have these capabilities, or analogues to them, for targetting American and NATO news and social feeds.

These sorts of forces are abound on social media websites, as can be seen in the recent Wired article "I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days" [10]. What's more, the role that social media has begun to play in political races is incredible. If you have the time and interest, look up the capabilities of incumbent Obama's "The Cave" for social media evangelism and tracking. Real time social estimates of support across dozens of major social media platforms with the ability to influence and target any of them at will. Interns scrambling to be "first to post" on online discussions in news media articles.

To be a member of online social media is to be surveilled by both governments and by corporations, to have your content curated for financial purposes, and to have your information sold to the highest bidder. It is also to be influenced not just by direct advertisement, but also indirectly through information that gets carried word of mouth. On the internet nobody knows that you are a dog. This is often an inconvenience and it allows trolls and other unsavory social behavior. Unfortunately it is now also true that on social media, those with the right perspective - those that can see social media at the thousand foot view - not only know that you are a dog, but also know how to make you drool when they ring a bell.

[1] http://www.linkdex.com/blog/social-contagion-why-ideas-and-p...

[2] http://icos.umich.edu/sites/icos6.cms.si.umich.edu/files/lec...

[3] http://www.msi.org/reports/distinguishing-among-mechanisms-o...

[4] http://www.msi.org/articles/what-drives-social-contagion-in-...

[5] http://socialmediaandmobileresearch.com/2014/03/10/social-co...

[6] http://minerva.dtic.mil/

[7] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[8] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...

[9] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The...

[10] http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-fac...

Addendum: Another trend in advertizing is 'contextual advertizing' where ads are injected into articles in ways that make them look like they are part of the content you intended to read. From the invention of 'viral marketing' to the rise of the corporate news (http://tinyurl.com/k28ssjh), to be on a social network and to be online is to be subject to the forces of private interests.

What Ello is saying is that they want to sell the service directly to the customer instead of selling the user's data to these private forces.

Rapzid• 12 years ago

An army of shills. Awesome, just what we needed.

TeMPOraL9• 12 years ago

Wow. I guess I'm out of date with state of the art after all...

Your post reminded me of an excellent passage from Yvain's recent post[0] (it's long, but it is a goldmine).

The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.

Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re pretty much screwed.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

DAddYE2• 12 years ago

I'm not in the beta program so from the outside is hard to judge. That said I find it very difficult that can even touch twitter or facebook. It reminds me a bit of app.net and ghost.org

However is impressive to me how much exposure ello is getting every day, don't get me wrong but right now I can't see why. Feel free to tell me that's I'm wrong, I'm really interested.

I wish them all the best but more importantly that this "hype" will last

te_chris• 12 years ago

Ghost is a blogging platform/OSS and quite a good one at that. Not sure what that has to do with the failure that is app.net?

DAddYE2• 12 years ago

Yep, that's the whole point. Judging from the profiles shown seems like a microblog. App.net was another twitter like tool that aimed in not selling your data and not showing ads.

sssilver• 12 years ago

Why is Ello a better choice for users than Diaspora?

xnull2guest7• 12 years ago

It exists in a usable fashion? Not to elbow Diaspora - they have a noble idea.

krenoten2• 12 years ago

It's suffering pretty nasty usability issues, actually.

gagege• 12 years ago

I think Diaspora happened at the wrong time. ello has a relatable "story" that people like and at this point pretty much everyone knows about privacy problems. I'm not saying ello is a better idea than Diaspora, I just think ello is making more sense to the average person right now than Diaspora ever did.

aortega• 12 years ago

Where does the money come form, if it is not from ads or selling the data? hosting is not free.

falsestprophet• 12 years ago

For thousands it nearly is free.

wildpeaks• 12 years ago

Apparently it's VC money: https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/

rohunati• 12 years ago

What is so "beautiful" about this? Honest question.

1) So much dead real estate.

2) The buttons the same as input fields. Only difference is color but there's no distinguishing otherwise.

3) Strange choice of font. Seems like they're going for a typewriter feel, but I'm not sure how that's useful for a website. My opinion of course, but I don't really see the aesthetic appeal of a typewriter look here.

iLoch2• 12 years ago

The design is absolutely awful. I would be very surprised to learn that any of these designers are actually familiar with UX design, let alone web design. I'm not an evangelist of typical web design these days - I think there's often too much emphasis on graphics. It looks nice, but it's exactly useful - BUT, it's still much better than this. This seems to be.. hmm.. a boring concoction of void space and meaningless alternatives to well known design patterns. But maybe that's what it's got going for it. Medium is a good example of Ello's design done right; you can focus on content and make text look beautiful - but it's not easy and you probably won't accomplish it with a generic monospace font (not hating the typewriter look, but it's poorly executed).

The real problem I see with Ello from a business perspective is that they don't have one. Where's the business? You're not selling ads, you're not selling your users information, they aren't buying anything (and won't) - where will the money come from?

skymt• 12 years ago

They plan to eventually sell features a la carte: https://ello.co/wtf/post/about-ello

oceanstone2• 12 years ago

The beauty resides in the privacy.

> It has been dubbed the "anti-Facebook" network because of a pledge to carry no adverts or sell user data.

ams6110• 12 years ago

Privacy and social networking are irreconcilable.

If you want to keep something private, don't post it on a social networking site.

TeMPOraL9• 12 years ago

Words, words, words. How many times a start-up pledges something (like, being there to actually solve a problem for users) only to get to "an exit" and disappear, selling on shutting down the product? Even if they really believe what they say (for which their cliché-laden copy is a negative evidence in my book), investors will want their returns. I don't think they're gonna pull this off with micropayments.

I need more than a pledge to start believing in a VC-backed startup.

keithg• 12 years ago

Looks tumblr-ish with a splash of Facebook thrown in. Or maybe tumblr/twitter hybrid?

ddw3• 12 years ago

Yeah a bit of each but with half the features.

Animats• 12 years ago

Maybe "free" has become too expensive. As the technology needed to provide a service gets cheaper, the revenue needed to support it drops. The ad density ought to drop too, but it doesn't. That creates a vulnerability for "free" social services. They can be undercut on user attention cost.

What does it really cost to run a social network? $5/user/month? $1/user/month? If you could put it on your phone bill, would you notice?

As for "The fact is nobody has ever made a significant move away from any internet provider because of advertising or data", remember Myspace. They were #1 once. Their ad density got too high and people got fed up and left.

TeMPOraL9• 12 years ago

What does it really cost to run a social network? $5/user/month? $1/user/month?

More than ${what parents will let their kid spend on the Internet}, which is usually > $0. The problem with non-free Internet is that it quickly gets inaccessible to those without credit cards.

eevilspock• 12 years ago

Maybe "free" has become too expensive.

Exactly! It's actually a lie that it's free in the first place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372640

naaaaak• 12 years ago

If this ever starts to become a serious competitor, Facebook will just acquire them and all bets are off.

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

It looks like Ello's claim is that the problems with social networks revolve around privacy and data mining. Personally, those things aren't nearly my primary issue - my main frustration with social media is the type of content it encourages people to share, resulting in (in my experience) a platform built primarily for expressions of vanity.

For me, until that changes, social media primarily exists as a personal communication mechanism via messages. In that case the network effect dominates all other features.

TeMPOraL9• 12 years ago

Closed-source, centralized, founders took VC money. How this is not at least as bad as Facebook?

Honestly, their copy feels like written by WhatsApp wannabes that got wind of some tech crowd clichés.

personjerry• 12 years ago

I saw a lot of hype about Ello in the Hackathon Hackers facebook group. This may be against the typical positive feedback mentality of HN, but it kinda seems like a huge circle, a product of the tech bubble enthusiasm, as no one else anywhere has mentioned it (except on Hacker News that one time).

In fact, I suspect the "31,000 invites" was the result of one post on the Facebook group involving an exploit that used dictionary attacks to generate invites for someone's account, which was quickly used by several people, but eventually taken down, and is not their average traffic.

I suspect this because my personal opinion, my friends' opinions, and it appears quite a number of Hacker News peoples opinions, while anecdotal, seem to indicate that Ello is quite lackluster, and I find it hard to believe that many people would want to try a social media platform that:

a) has none of their friends on it yet

b) doesn't look great

c) appeals to you through things you typically don't care about ("ads", "data", "privacy")

no_future• 12 years ago

You can create a social networking app in 2014 with not a single standout feature and it will get users?

And here was me thinking that to be successful now you needed a somewhat original idea or a flawless execution, shows what I know I guess.

hmans• 12 years ago

Ello is living proof of the importance of a story. You see, Ello wasn't just built, it was built "by artists" "frustrated" with the "establishment". There you go! Instant story, instant success.

ddw3• 12 years ago

This. Is there really this much funding out there? Here I am trying to make useful things when all I need to do is collect users in some low stakes thing.

ddw3• 12 years ago

While we are talking about new social media alternatives, Sublevel (sublevel.net) may be worth checking out. No funding, actually works.

brewdad• 12 years ago

They've already lost. Since I didn't see a link to Ello in the article, I typed ello.com into my browser. Nope.

I had to search to find out it's ello.co Average user won't bother.

pXMzR2A• 12 years ago

I am very confused about this whole thing. What does Ello provide that Diaspora cannot? (srs)

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

More focused development, for starters. Raising capital and getting features built is ... difficult.

Also a compelling story and userbase. There are people on Ello who aren't on Diaspora (I'm on both) despite the latter having been around for quite a while now.

Both lack search, which ... kind of sucks.

What would be really cool is if Ello might figure out a way to talk with Diaspora, essentially becoming a large node of it (or Friendica, or whatever).

'Anti-Facebook' platform Ello attracts thousands

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