I heard a discussion about that thing a couple of days ago in a local radio show here and they talked about how promising and cool that new social network is. They also basically said that everyone who thinks it wouldnt make it is stupid and doesnt know what he's saying.
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.
The other Whatsapp, Telegram, is doing pretty well it seems in my environment with most contact immediately enabling end-to-end encryption. Maybe I'm in a privacy-aware bubble. True, there as also that other twitter people were enthusiastic about (even though it didn't do anything different from status.net). Diaspora didn't really become popular as well.
I almost did this to my friend group (who use iMessage and WhattsApp exclusively)
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.
Im my group of friends I am that guy who likes shiny new things and nothing has beaten mail/sms/phone (and facebook messages for vague acquaintances as a last resort) yet.
I have to agree. The social network business is quite harsh. The new networks that have emerged in the post facebook era do not really offer something in addition to what facebook does. They just recycle some of the "features" of Facebook in its early stages. So...Ello is ads free. Who will pay for it? Donations? That could work. Is that a stable income when it comes to scaling out (should it become successful)? I honestly doubt it.
I hear this all the time, and though it may be true that "young people aren't into Facebook anymore," I think it misses the point.
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 have a 14 year old and their habits are interesting. They don't use FB. They hate how FB messes with a timeline. They were big Instagram users but dumped it pretty hard and are all in on SnapChat. Instagram is only for very deliberate "statement" photos (dressed up for school dance etc) They don't need multitask SN's like FB. They use single task apps and switch all the time between them without blinking. And they have no loyalty. They'd drop SnapChat in a second I suspect if the 3 coolest kids started using something else.
> On the other hand, young people (below 18) aren't that much into facebook anymore.
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.
>> "On the other hand, young people (below 18) aren't that much into facebook anymore."
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.
This seems pretty similar to http://app.net when they started out. I don't think the "no ads social network" really panned out for them -- they tried charging users monthly for the site and have since pivoted so many times they're probably dizzy. Best of luck to ello.co, maybe the NSA revelations will make everyone a little more careful about who gets access to what they share!
For anyone else who thinks the site is a bit weird and has a hard time finding their profit model:
> 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.
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.
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.
1) Who cares about ads on Facebook? They are not giant ads, or popunders or whatever. Sometimes they are relevant. The FB page 'ads' (that say they are sponsored) can be very relevant sometimes. People care more about things like privacy, and how easy it is to share things ('statuses' / photos / videos) with certain people.
2) The design (no offense to whoever made it) is a bit weird. Monospaced font?
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.
It's not clear who this new social network is supposed to be for.
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?
A developer social network? Coderwall or even Github to some extent.
A designer social network? Dribble.
A photographers social network? 500px.
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.
Geez, a bit of competition would be nice -- makes for better products. So only Zuckerberg is allowed to mediate all our social communication? Lucky him.
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?
Because they would become monstrous behemoths that did everything at a lower quality. For instance - Mixcloud and Soundcloud each serve a real purpose, separate from one another. It may seem like they do the same thing (connecting people over music) but really they have refined their respective systems around what they are built for - focus on single tracks and the other on music sets. Now if google started doing that, it would not be anywhere near as refined because their platform would have to serve other purposes; if facebook started hosting repositories it would be diluted with everything else they do.
I agree, competition would be nice, and I also do care about privacy and not being the product.
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.
I'm not really up to date on what they're doing at the minute but can I ask why app.net doesn't meet your requirements? The fundamental difference here seems to be app.net always charge but ello gives more flexibility around if and what to buy - or is there something I'm missing?
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.
> The fundamental difference here seems to be app.net always charge
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.
The invite-only thing works when people actually are compelled to sign up for your site. What is compelling about this? Seriously, I'm already inundated with a bunch of equally terrible social media sites, why would I indulge myself the chore of signing up for this one or fish for an invite to it?
I see nothing on that site that would make me trust it with my data. It says it won't monetize through ads, but how will it monetize? Is my data involved other than through targeting ads at me? ? Why should I trust a centralized, unfederated service with my data as opposed to one that I could host myself (such as Diaspora)?
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.
If I understand it completely, they're trying to become a centralized blend of Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, and they have no real idea how to make money except accepting tips for infrequently introduced features.
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.
> 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.
I'm a developer at Modeset, we have some open source, and try to contribute back whenever possible and time permits. If you specifically mean code for the ello.co product, there will likely be things that come out of it over time -- it's a pretty hard business model to open source stuff that you haven't completed yet.
Hint: if you are starting a social network, let people sign up as soon as you go public. The number of users you have is what will make or break you. Denying immediate entry is turning away your customers, most likely for good.
For Facebook, exclusivity was a feature because it was directly related to craved social status (belonging to an elite university). For GMail, exclusivity worked because it was directly related to craved features (large capacity for email attachments).
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 find it amazing, how some of you "experts" judge without deeper knowledge. A good part of you without even taking a look. The comments on the bycicles are downright stupid ignorance.
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.
While searching for new social networks, I came across an app called Groopie. I'm still trying to figure out how to use it but you can record videos with your friends. You ping them to record. After they are done recording, their footage will get uploaded to your phone in seconds, then you can edit and blend the two to create one video. Seems like they are on to something!
It's not secure or encrypted, they see everything you do and so therefor so can others. A next gen mobile app called Kover is in beta in the apple AppStore. It's completely encrypted and works either facebook and Twitter even.
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.