What is Ello?
Ello is a minimalist, ad-free social network that promises to give its users full freedom to share while protecting their privacy. It was founded by a bike-shop owner named Paul Budnitz and a few other artists from the graphic design firm Berger & Föhr. Ello was originally meant to be a private social network for Budnitz and his friend, but then he decided to go global.
Unlike any other social network, Ello despises selling ads and collecting user data. The team behind Ello promises never to place ads inside its website or to collect user data to sell to advertisers. Instead, the company aims to offer premium features in the social network for a few dollars, in order to keep its servers running.
Why It’s Different
Ello has few great features that I found to be very useful. For example, Ello shows the view count of each of your post, so you can see how many people have seen your post. On Facebook, you have to pay to show your posts to all your friends, Ello does that for free.
In addition, the clean interface is quite refreshing to look at. You won’t see many colors inside Ello. The entire user interface of the website consists of only black, gray and white. Simplicity is the main focus of the website. Once you’re in, you can share your ideas, follow new users, friend them, and comment on their posts. That’s pretty much all you can do inside Ello right now.
Bad Timing
The world-wide press coverage for Ello made this new social network look great, and according to its founders, Ello is now getting over 30,000 invite requests per day from people around the world. Actually, the timing of this couldn’t be more worse.
Ello is still in its earliest stages of development, and it offers only very few features for its users. It’s buggy and actually not user-friendly at all. Even setting up a profile can be quite frustrating. I had to upload my profile picture for over five times before it was saved. Discover section will show you popular user profiles, but searching for topics will not show any posts made by users. You can share GIF’s, but sharing videos is not quite ready yet.
Obviously, Ello will require a long time to improve its features before opening up to public. And by the time of that happening, the people who are waiting to join or the users who’s already joined will probably be moved on to better things.
Will It Survive?
People like ads. Even though many deny it, people like seeing new products, discounted offers to things they love, and new content that they have never seen before. This is one of the main reasons why you keep going back to Facebook every day. You enjoy seeing new things, updates from your favorite celebrities and clicking on those promoted news stories.
Being a user of a premium-quality, ad-free social network will attract many users and it will definitely make them feel special. However, its doubtful for anyone to give up Facebook or Twitter to use a social network like Ello.
Want to Join Ello?
Ello still doesn’t have pages or communities for your favorite interests, and you’re friend’s haven’t joined yet. So basically you have to stick with reading some random posts from strangers, for now. Needless to say, you can get bored pretty easily while using it. It’s understandable, since it’s an invite-only social network.
If you’re looking for a full featured-packed social networking experience, Ello is not ready for you. I would strongly suggest for you to wait at least until it fixes its buggy features. But, if you feel like giving it a try before everyone else, I can help you join.
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Leave a comment below if you need an invite. I only have 4 invites left, so make sure your comment stand out from the crowd. Once you get an invite code, head over here and enter your code to register for Ello.
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Follow @nrjperera – Roshan Jerad Perera