My short, uneventful flirtation with Ello: Jon Swartz
SAN FRANCISCO — Goodbye, Ello.
It took me just five days to join, explore and ditch the latest next big thing in tech.
Newbie social network Ello touts itself as the anti-Facebook, a minimalist-designed website free of ads and boasting a progressive name-use policy. The LGBT community is embracing the site after being booted from Facebook because of its "real" name policy.
"You are the product that's bought and sold," Ello's leaders pronounced in a manifesto online. "We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency."
And yet ...
The utopian underpinnings to Vermont-based Ello are admirable. The invite-only service plans on making money with a "freemium" model, in which users purchase special features to customize their Ello experience.
Many seem to agree: Ello is adding some 40,000 new members per hour, while some invites to the social network are for sale on eBay for as much as $5,000. Ello is being barraged with invite requests because it is in the news and people have a fear of missing out (FOMO). Membership also qualifies as a bit of a "humblebrag," which is quite trendy among nerds.
And yet ...
The site is buggy — it's hard to search for people you know — and suffered an outage last weekend, which it blamed on a DDoS attack.
The overly simplistic design and some features are a departure from Facebook. A counter keeps track of views each post gets; a Noise section displays posts from people you may not know. Yet the site, in total, seems sparse, even lonely.
This morning, I pulled the plug on Ello.
Much as I wanted to add it to my collection of social media tools, it just wasn't to be.
Or perhaps my brief flirtation with Ello is symptomatic of tech trends, where one's infatuation with shiny new toys can be passionate, if short-lived.
Secret, Yo, Ello. It's a roll call of social media curiosities that quickly gained favor among early adopters before they moved on to the next Big Thing.
Andy Warhol theorized about 15 minutes of fame. In Silicon Valley or tech in general, it can be 15 days, give or take a news cycle.
Ello is the latest social network with hopes of denting Facebook.
But being relevant in an increasingly crowded social networking market isn't easy. App.net, a platform for accessing social applications on one network, boasted a similar manifesto to Ello's and vowed no advertising. It presses on quietly.
Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr were all ad-free before relenting.
Maybe Ello catches on and eventually becomes the next Twitter or Snapchat. If it does, it will without me. That's because I just heard of this cool new app that's the talk of the Valley ...
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