'Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make, and every link you follow is tracked, recorded, and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity, and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.
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.
You are not a product.'
What an appealing manifesto. I registered my account immediately.
The minimalism of the site took me by surprise. There are only a few buttons to click, some icons to drag and two feeds to choose from. The other feed is your friends on ello, the other is called Noise, curated posts from the world of ello. As ello is new and in a clever way restricting the number of accounts, there is not much content in there yet. It's like people are holding their breath for the conversation to happen.
There is a discovery tool (how to use it is not obvious unless you have been following the development of html5-standard for the past few years) to find people on ello. You can try to browse for friends or people you might know on ello but won't find very much there I'm afraid because of the invitation-only policy.
The noise-section is totally useless as well, apparently the moderators of ello are still too busy to make the system run somehow and have no time to curate the list. Actually the noise-list smells of abandon after you've hopefully reloaded it over the past few days and then you give up on it completely.
Some key things you have got accustomed to with social networking sites are missing. And I think they are missing for a purpose. There is no Like. This in my opinion is a pretty interesting choice. In my opinion, the Like button is a handy indicator of the amount of least possible interaction, acknowledging the author that you have read the post and feel like you want to convey your reaction.
Not having a like button might stem from an idea to make people use the comment function more. However, this does not happen. People are not commenting very much. I think partly this has something to do with most users still trying to get the feel of the 'ello world' and are refraining from commenting to avoid saying something stupid. This is wrong. I think we all have a constitutional right to make fools of ourselves on social media.
Another, way more interesting aspect about the no-like-button-disfeature is the way it sort of fights the compulsive need for acknowledgement that I think is one of the fundamental things that keeps people coming back to facebook or whatever. Of course one could argue that social media needs a way to convey acknowledgement. In contrast to having a real, face to face conversation with it's accepting nods and disapproving frowns etcetera, social media communication like a severely handicapped, deaf blind and dumb person who can only lift one finger to express approval or disapproval. The analogy might sound harsh but let's face it, computers are dumb.
On ello you can however see how many people saw your post but not who saw it. Was it a friend or a foe or a random person? How did they find me? When you keep posting things on ello (feels like you are sending letters in a bottle btw), sometimes you get a very low key e-mail that such and such is following you on ello. You can click on the followers profile to see what that person is all about. In 64 or so characters =)
Currently ello is a strange mix of twitter and facebook with more weight on twitteritude. I think ello has a lot of work ahead to streamline itself. The shroud of secrecy conveniently obscured by the minimalism of the site will put people off ello after the first login. It's ok to profile yourself as a 'not for dummies' service but come on guys, a few tooltips here and here will make things so much easier.
Likes and views are handy for facebook who needs to keep track of what kind of ads to display to you. I think there are plenty of things to experiment in this respect and ello can still keep experimenting for at least a year whereas facebook cannot do that anymore. They are stuck with views and likes and that's sooo yesteryear.
The real problem I hope ello would solve both have something something to do with the obsessive-compulsive nature of social media. How convey the reactions of your audience in a way that is more abstract and more gratifying that likes and views. It's different type of media of course but these are the things we're thinking of building Hoodownr. How to keep people coming back without resorting to predatory tactics. There has to be a better way and we have to find it.
Is ello redeeming it's obscured-by-minimalism hipster promises? Not yet. But It can. New beginnings are great for that exact reason: they are New beginnings. See you on ello!
Cheers,
Sami
@hoodownr at ello.co
