Meet Ello. The Buggy Beta Social Network That has Facebook Shaking in its Boots.
Ello was the talk of Facebook timeline this weekend. My friends, most of them not in the tech industry, were singing it’s praises in spades, even after only hours of using the service.
I don’t know what made me beg for an Ello invite. Maybe it was the Fear of Missing Out? Maybe I was jealous that my friends had something that I didn’t. Maybe I had a fear of not being “cool” anymore since I never initially got a beta invite in the first place.
Either way, I begged a friend for an invitation like Gmail in 2004.
My initial excitement was met with disappointment. Ello is buggy and bland. Many of it’s promised features aren’t working yet. The front end design leaves a lot to be desired, and unlike Snapchat or Secret, the service is not doing much to re-invent the social space, just rehashing the tools that we use already. Even with all that’s not going for it, Ello is winning right now…because it’s not Facebook.
Ever since Facebook became the king of social media, analysts began to wonder if the site would ever have a mass-scale defection like MySpace in 2008. However, no matter how many times people threaten to leave Facebook — whether it’s because of changing privacy policies, or because their mom commented on on a post about their night out — the service continues to grow, and user engagement numbers continue to rise.
Other networks such as Instagram (now owned by Facebook), Tumblr or Twitter continue to chip away at engagement numbers, but none have the wherewithal to knock down the king.
Until now.
Ello’s positive reception stems from it’s genuinely worded manifesto, taking down the very core of ad-supported networks and their “betrayal” of users. Beginning with the sentence “Your social network is owned by advertisers,” and ending with the statement “You are not a product,” Ello’s everyman, 99% ethos resonates with everyone who now knows that social networks are more a data gathering tool than a place to post a photo of that amazing brunch. In addition, the timing cannot be any better, as Facebook is facing backlash because of it’s threats to out many in the LGBT community because of it’s real names policy.
And this is what has Facebook scared. Users happily continue to post content to the service because it became the default. The site has began to take it’s users for granted, treating their data like a commodity and failing to innovate, and at 10 years old it has already become the old man at the club, trying it’s hardest to compete with younger, sexier startups.
Having that said, the road for Ello’s success is a long one. The site reportedly is gaining 30,000 users an hour, and possibly upwards of a million a day. Even if only a fraction of these users become active that still leaves a massive amount of text, photos, images and bandwidth to support on a daily basis. In addition, the company will need to add staff to deal with customer service issues, bullying complaints, and public relations. And that’s not cheap.
Even with it’s faults, a company like Ello has got to have the people in Menlo Park nervous. I predict Facebook will take several measures over the next few weeks to reassert their dominance by limiting data collected by advertisers or even walking back from it’s real names policy.
But is it too little too late? Only time will tell. Let me get the popcorn.
