Still, we will not leave him, because he is good (Ello)

This summer, I met with one of the pioneers of the it-industry - Jaron Lanier, he talked about virtual reality technology . Lanier is an active critic of online advertising business models, and when Facebook bought Oculus Rift, it was a sign of its own. “With the advent of the new platform, the chance to create a new economic model appears,” said Lanier.

The dream of an alternative to non-replaceable Facebook as a whole explains a strong interest in Ello , a social network of 3 months from the code, the whole idea of ​​which is hatred of the idea of ​​Internet advertising in any of its manifestations. The service has only a website, and it gained some fame thanks to reviews from artists and LGBT supporters who did not make friends with Facebook because of the inability to use pseudonyms. Ello was hit by a hurricane from the attention of the press and mentions on social networks, after which the registration queue (need an invite) increased to 1 million people.
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This social. the network has a kind of chance, the ability to create a profitable service based not on the sale of your personal data. This is the idea behind the creators ’ manifesto , which suggests the“ best way. ” The collection and sale of information about you and your friends and the transfer of all these bundles to the side is presented to the creators of Ello by an unethical and frightening approach . Under the guise of a free service, users pay a high price in the form of intrusive advertising and lack of anonymity.

Now, in the early stages of her life, Ello is just an uncomplicated social. network with a clean and simple design and minimal feature set. You can create posts, post photos and write answers to other users. Ello resembles a clean sheet, no one knows what exactly the idea of ​​ad-free social news will result in where your data will remain only yours.

What a beast it's ello

At the moment, how many functions performed in Ello can be described in one word - “wonderful”. Logged in, you will see the site, divided into two parts. On the left - large round avatars of people you are subscribed to, located in a shapeless and inexplicable order, and all you can do with them is to stick on a username and go to profile. The second half of the page is, of course, a tape with posts of these very people, which are displayed in their virgin form, regardless of their length and content.



This is a hodgepodge of ordinary pictures, gifs and text, Ello say that they are not against nsfw, so accept this as a fact. Answers to posts get into your tape, even if the person you are subscribed to responds to a user unfamiliar to you, but you do not receive any notifications about the answers to your records, they simply do not exist at all. As in any social program, all the so-called testers are doing, this is a discussion of the site as a whole: someone shares links to interesting accounts or throws various soviets (for example, shift + 1 will make your “friends” userpics fill out the screen) or just complain the lack of functionality (no black lists or even private messages, for now).

Ello is just starting to form. The site is full of bugs, search for example does not work at all, and Ello itself likes to fall from time to time - however, not as often as it could, despite the speed of its growth. There are no applications for smartphones yet, but there is a mobile version of the site, which works tolerably well with the low functionality it provides.

The founders say that over time, users will be able to pay for additional chips, some kind of shopping in applications, $ 1.99 for Emoji or the ability to manage multiple accounts at the same time. They need to somehow pay the 435,000 green presidents they received from FreshTracks Capital, a venture capital firm from Vermont. The creators hope that with time Ello will grow into a fully functional and lively alternative to the already existing social services. networks.

However, the likelihood that Ello will be bent is great, but what if they are lucky? What if they succeed?

Toy robots, bicycles, and now social

Ello was invented (if I may say so) by a group led by Paul Badnets, a 47-year-old artist and manufacturer of designer items. Previously, he successfully visited Kickstarter with the project of the unusual toy store Kidrobot and Budnitz Bicycles - a service for creating custom bikes. Badnets and his friends were looking for a place to discuss common projects and (suddenly) they did not like the existing social networks. And then they took the design studio Berger & Föhr , combined them with the developers from Mode Set, and began to make Ello, the first version of which began to be harvested back in April , sending invitations to the test began in July, and everything began to turn.



Paul Badnets himself.

On the last Thursday of September, various masses of LGBT supporters began to move away from Facebook towards Ello, since it is vital for them to post under their assumed names, and the rules of the Licookion do not allow such liberties. Ello began to receive up to 4 thousand requests for invites per hour (the power of lgbt, okay), this number increased 10 times in 24 hours and the rate did not decrease until next Monday, in any case, such data came from the company. The information buzz about Ello is quite widely sold out in Germany, since they especially advocate for the protection of personal information, Ello sources said that most of the new arrivals are US users.

Along with the popularity of the network, skepticism about Ello's promises about its advertising, security and gratuity increased. Andy Baio (the writer and organizer of the festivals) was one of the first to write about his concerns about what Ello founders are supposedly striving for and what they started with. Back in January, the company received the same $ 435,000 investment, and the deal itself was announced only in March. The point is that soc. It will be extremely difficult for the network to pay this money if it does not suddenly begin to grow exponentially (in order to pay for features that the truth does not yet have, users are still needed). Meanwhile, the writer Queen Norton spoke about the many problems of social networks that they face as they grow. "The code becomes too much, the monetization model does not work as it should, hosting does not stand up and much, much more."

So, what does Ello need to succeed? They need money, and the sooner the better. They will need to urgently hire staff, and not only in order to cope with the upcoming difficulties that Norton described. However, these guys rejected the request for an interview from the author of this text, citing employment, so surely they know what awaits them.

A series of failures

Much of the skepticism about Ello is related to one fact: social networks based on the idea of ​​the security of your data have never been popular. People shout that they do not want their data to “merge” somewhere, but at the same time they continue to share with Facebook (om) stories of their lives. On the launch of Google+, its most important aspect was considered the lack of advertising as well as the so-called “Circles”, when you could share certain content with certain people and only with them, but everyone knows that Google lives your data, and social itself. the network, after the departure of its main ideological creator from the company , is only maintained afloat, but does not develop as actively as at the very beginning. You can recall the Path, soc. network for mobile devices which is already 4 years old. But the closest ideological ally of Ello is probably Diaspora, whose founders “raised” $ 200,000 to Kickstarter, with promises to create exactly the same thing as Ello. And then these people left the project less than two years after its launch.

Early interest in Ello is based on the effect of novelty, because besides this in the newly-minted social. there is no network. Some of the users are those who want to "stake out" successful nicknames, but someone just wonders what's what. Someone had a chance to build everything anew, maybe to find a new audience or to escape from the pressure of brands and advertising present in any other social system. media And for someone it's just a place where he can do nothing.

The functional is not enough, but it is a hope that it will be exactly the way users want it to be. In such projects, it’s interesting not that they continue to appear and disappear one after another, but that each successive one continues to attract us and makes us believe that this project will be different, that such a utopian model is possible.