The Social Network and The Sociological Imagination.

What have individual users' experiences been of the new social network Ello?

• Just a few minutes ago I set up my account on https://ello.co/ The earliest mentions of this new social networking I can find date from March of this year ("http://motherboard.vice.com/read/you-are-not-a-product-ello-wants-to-be-the-anti-facebook-social-network", from Vice), but judging by mentions on Facebook it's really taking off just now. Betabeat's article "http://betabeat.com/2014/09/mysterious-social-network-ello-explodes-in-popularity-for-people-fleeing-facebook/" outlines the gradual takeoff and the ethos of its founders. When  they started their roll-out in July, Ello got a few sign-ups from the  mailing list generated from word-of-mouth buzz. Each day after, they  grew twice as large, which ramped up to three times as large each day.  Then, after The Daily Dot declared yesterday that “the great gay  Facebook exodus” had begun, interest in Ello went nuclear. Ello’s  founder told Betabeat that he’s seeing 4000 new signups each hour.  People are frantically tweeting each other about Ello, and traffic on  our Ello stories from six months back has exploded. So  what is Ello? Ello is an anachronistic social network designed by Paul  Budnitz, designer toy maker, bike builder and author extraordinaire.  It’s a social network with a manifesto — a grandiose cry for social  networking that empowers people, and against social networks that lie,  manipulate you and treat you like a product. This  writer has been lurking Ello for the past few weeks to get a feel for  the interface and community. It’s like a paired-down mix of Tumblr and  Facebook, only more sleek and clean, with panels and buttons designed to  be so sparse that they hardly infringe on the white space of each page. To  add friends, you sort them into one of two categories, “Friends” or  “Noise.” Browsing your Friends is like seeing a Facebook news feed with  large-format updates, where looking at the Noise compresses everything  down into a cascade of bite-sized bits, like power-browsing someone’s  Tumblr archives. Most  of the users so far are a culture club of coders and visual artists.  Built with these users in mind, the visual content takes center stage —  the text is shown in command-line courier, and the menu bar can recede  quickly if you click it away. And of course, there are no ads anywhere  to be found. Is anyone else on Ello? What are your experiences of it so far?

• Answer:

  So far, I find it to be pretty under-utilized by the kinds of people I'm connected with on other social networks--namely, political & union organizers. While I like the overall concept, it's going to have to have a pretty quick uptake rate to get me to spend a ton of time there.