Tag Archives: ello.co

Pumpkin Spice?

Posted on October 25, 2014 by Tim Hall

Ello might not be the Facebook-killer we are looking for, for it’s yet another closed propietary silo.

Maybe it will be something like Pumpkin Spice, an idea that’s come from the delightfully retro tilde club.

Take all the standards we’ve got – RSS, Atom, FOAF, email, etc. – and use them to simulate Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc. while letting the user own all the data, and without requiring the user to sell their personal data or eyeballs.

There are a lot of projects out there that let you own your data, but usually that means you go buy a raw server. Ain’t nobody got time for that, where “nobody” means “my relatives.” What we need is something that’s absolutely brain-dead easy to use, and that simulates a social network they’re already using. That means it has to have content, which means it has to be pretty agnostic about what it allows you to “friend.” Under the hood it’s mostly an RSS/Atom reader, but it’s also got to make use of as many proprietary APIs as it can, to pull in Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, whatever the stuff they want to follow is on. Of course, since ideally those “friends” catch on and bail on the silo’d, privacy-hungry social networks, being able to use those APIs for long is going to be a problem.

This sounds like an interesting concept; a decentralised social network that doesn’t rely on any server-side infrastracture of its own, doing everything in the client.

Given the increasing popularity of tablets, especially their adoption by the generation that grew up before the internet, it will really need client applications for Android and IoS as well as Windows.

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I am now seeing posts on LinkedIn saying “What does ello.co mean for brands?” Can we point these people towards the B-Ark, please?

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Ello, Goodbye

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Tim Hall

elloIs ello.co the first social network to jump the shark before it’s even out of beta?

Today has not been a good day for the fledgeling application. Their expansion coincided with a mass exodus from Facebook as a consequence of Facebook’s heavy-handed enforcement of their “real names” policy, and a flood of new users found a system that wasn’t ready for prime time. Simultaneously serious doubts have been raised about their potential business model.

First, the beta went live without any form of block or muting functionality, which ought to be a fundamental part of any social networking application, and guarantees it will turn toxic the moment the trolls turn up in any numbers. Which also makes it unsafe for anyone who’s concerned about being stalked or harassed online. They did have a lengthy and rather vague list of speech codes, some of which were themselves problematic, which combined with a lack of a block function gave the impression they wanted the sort of centralised top-down moderation typical for smaller community sites rather than the sort of decentralised user-level moderation that actually works for larger unfocussed networks. This might explain why knowledgeable and reliable people believed the hoax that ello were banning users referencing “#GamerGate” as “hate speech”.

Second, it’s another closed-source proprietary system with no API and no means of exporting the data you’ve been putting in to it. The world really doesn’t need yet another walled garden that retains complete control over your data and your connections. I still live in hope that the next generation of social networking will be an ecosystem of open source applications which no one corporation controls. I’m not holding my breath though.

Finally, the founders never revealed the fact that they were funded by venture capitalists, which suggests the promises of being ad-free and not selling user data may well not survive the exit strategy demanded by the VCs. Vague promises not to be evil seldom survive IPOs or sales.

At the moment, I don’t think ello.co is for me. There is a chance that it might take off. But at the moment at its best it’s value little more than an insurance policy against Twitter turning bad. I can’t see it becoming the Facebook killer it’s been touted to be. It’s more likely to fade away like app.net did.

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