Ello: the anti-Facebook meant to be private and pretty, but
Source: Nicky Woolf
Ello says ‘to the best of our knowledge what you do on Ello useless to Google for advertising features.’ Photograph: screengrab
Is it the Facebook-killer? Ello, the so-new-it’s-glistening, so-hip-it-hurts upstart social network has set out to be the artsy, LGBTQ-friendly, anti-advertising and anti-big-data alternative to social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. After an explosion of popularity this week, its small team is scrambling to deal with unprecedented growth, with as many as 35,000 people requesting membership invites every hour. But can it cope? Here’s what you need to know.
It’s the anti-Facebook
Its manifesto starts with a clear shot across Zuckerburg’s bows: “Your social network is owned by advertisers,” it says. “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.”
It ends: “You are not a product.” Ello’s founders have pledged that the site will never sell user data to advertisers, or introduce a paywall. There have been a number of trend-pieces already calling Ello a Facebook-killer, but it bears remembering that in terms of sheer size Ello is currently not even a speck on Facebook’s radar-screen. It would have to maintain its current explosive rate of growth for almost a decade before it would start to threaten Facebook’s 1.28 billion-strong user base. But the social web is fickle, and stranger things have happened.
They’re as surprised by this week’s growth as everyone else
The Guardian caught up with one of Ello’s founders, designer Todd Berger, who said that as recently as Monday, the team had no idea that things would “blow up” the way they have.
“The barrage of traffic we’re getting right now is unexpected and unplanned-for,” he said. “I dont want to say it’s throwing us off our game, but it is a little bit. It’s a deluge. In terms of new sign-ups, the quantity of data we’re processing is unbelievable.”
He said that they didn’t themselves know for sure what had caused it, but pointed to two factors; first, that they had been featured on a Y Combinator blog post on Monday, and second, that leaders from the LGBTQ community had apparently chosen them to host their exodus from Facebook over its real-name policy.
The atmosphere was “pretty exciting. It’s pretty fun,” Berger said, but added: “It was more fun yesterday when most of the press was positive. There’s all sorts of crazy wild stories happening, some emails faked, some screenshots photoshopped, and people are speculating about our investors. It’s cool, everyone has thick skin.”
It’s private
Access to Ello is by invitation-only, and after the recent spike in popularity �C user applications for invites have fluctuated between 20,000 and 35,000 an hour (“warp speed”, as Budnitz described it) �C and the site has slowed down their acceptance of new users in order to deal with the scale of its new base.
Immediately afterwards, invites began trading on eBay for as much as $100. Ello uses Google Analytics to collect user data, though they say “before information about you is stored on the Google servers, your IP address is stripped and anonymized.” “To the best of our knowledge”, the site says, “this also makes what you do on Ello useless to Google for advertising purposes.” Google did not respond to request by the Guardian for comment on this. Ello’s team also say they aim to make it easy for users to opt-out of all data collection and sharing if they choose.
But:
It’s going to cost money for features. Some have been expressing doubts this week about Ello’s business model. Andy Baio, a web developer who helped to build Kickstarter, uncovered the nearly $500m Ello received from tech venture-capitalists FreshTracks Capital. “VCs don’t give money out of goodwill,” he said in a post on Ello. “Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability. Tech journalist Quinn Norton has also expressed doubt. “Ello needs to make money, and that means Ello eventually needs to charge someone.”
In answer to this, Berger told the Guardian that the plan was to roll out a system where users pay to add features �C including, he said, privacy features �C at some point in the future. “Privacy comes at a cost,” he said, “and some of our enhanced privacy features will come with fees.”
It’s LGBTQ-friendly
In what the Daily Dot called the “Great Gay Facebook Exodus”, users are apparently abandoning Facebook for Ello in protest about Facebook’s controversial naming policy, under which drag queens were pressured to use their legal names instead of their stage names.
Berger told the Guardian that the move may have been “a little naive for both parties”.
“We got a couple of emails from people who claimed to be leaders of the LGBTQ community … we didn’t understand the significance,” he said. “A lot of the safety features weren’t in place.” He said that in response to the move the team were expediting features like user-blocking, and that they “love having this community on Ello”.
It’s erotica-friendly
The site’s original use policy stated “No Porn. We know it when they see it,” but on Wednesday developer Justin Gitlin said on Twitter that was “old wording”, adding, “we honestly are open to NSFW content.”
Later, the rules were updated to include a system which shields users who don’t want to see porn from adult content by tagging it as NSFW.
It’s pretty
Ello was put together by a team of “seven well-known artists and programmers”, and the lead founder is Paul Budnitz, who also owns Kidrobot �C an artisan art toy and fashion maker �C and Budnitz Bicycles, where he designs and makes of luxury bikes. The cheapest starts at $2,395.
Currently, Ello is in a pleasing palatte of black and grey; its logo, a black sphere with a smile drawn on in white with no eyes is a clue to the simplistic aesthetic the designers are going for. You choose to add people as either “friends” or “noise”, which is a way to differentiate between posts you care more or less about �C others don’t get to know which feed you put them in. The developers say this aims to reduce clutter.
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