http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2014/09/hello-no-ello/
...Other problems are:
Ello is not mobile ready. When I tried to upload a header and a profile picture from my iPad the former went in upside down and the latter went in sideways. I was able to correct that on my laptop today, but loading time is slow, and putting in a new avatar doesn’t seem to displace the prior one on all pages.
It’s hard to know what to do when there is no one else there. Ello? Ello!!! Anyone out there? (Actually my digital and IRL buddy @siva just found me a few minutes ago. It was a bit like being in a small European town and then suddenly running into an old college pal. Ello @siva!)
Upsides:
It’s pretty. Ello has a black and white design, very simple: not unlike a Word Press blog, come to think of it.
It’s new! It feels different and unexplored! Social media is beginning to feel a bit like old media nowadays. It isn’t just the ads; it’s the quarrels and the wasted time. Social media is great and it is terrible. It’s like TV. There are sublime moments like watching the last episode of Orange Is the New Black, season two, after you have binged three in a row. Then there is that feeling you have after watching a whole evening of MSNBC “news” shows or several football games in a row, where you are sitting there with acid splashing around in your stomach wondering if you would have a named chair if God had never invented cable teevee.
You can sort people into two categories: “Friends” and “Noise.” People in “Noise” never have to know they are in “Noise.”
They have beliefs. They believe that selling people’s data is the wrong way to make money. Then how will they make money? you ask. By selling apps. “We occasionally offer special features to our users,” they explain. Although you can use it free forever, “If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.” (I particularly like the elegant way they avoid the words “sell” and “buy” in that sentence, by the way.) This would follow, say, the Evernote model, where you can use the free version indefinitely, but the more you like it, the more it seems like it is your social and ethical duty to pay $45.00 a year for full service. Contrast this to the Tony Soprano protection-racket model where you pay Facebook or Yahoo not to be confronted with ads that offer you the opportunity to date on line, marry Russian women, buy a house in Albuquerque, rid yourself of wrinkles, support yourself with online work, or grow your penis.
Ello has a business model that will stop pushing buttons we never had and restore the dreams we did have before joining Facebook. “We believe there is a better way,” The Ello Manifesto declares. “We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity, and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life. You are not a product.”
Ello claims they will not permit cyberbullying and other kinds of nasty behavior. That’s nice — but it remains to be seen whether this is enforceable, unless they have an algorithm no one else has or have a solution for the conflict in Gaza. Of course, if they would like some names of academics to be banned before they even ask for an account, I would be happy to supply them.
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