Exploring Ello
At some point last week a new social network appeared on the internet called Ello. I learned about it after digging aninvite from my junk mailwhich caused immediate thoughts about other invites vanishing into junk mailfolders the world over (most spam engines are crowd sourcedespecially in these days of cloud hosted email).
For the first hour or so I found nothing but disagreement with the Ello interface. It is more minimal in nature than most interfaces, which causes a certain level of confusion to begin with. While it works in much the same way as other micro-blogs, there are telling differencesmostly through their absence; There is no tagging of content in Ello (yet), meaning searches are organic, and discovery of interesting people is typically achievedvia the person firstnot the content. There is no facility to “like” content, as Facebook, or Tumblr would encourage. If you want to interact with a post, you must write a written comment.
I will admit to smiling when I saw that posts and comments use Markdown syntax. I've been a huge fan of Markdown since it's first appearance, and have used it in a number of my own projects over the years. It generates absolutely clean, semantically correct HTML, unlike “rich” editors that churn out all manner of garbage.
After acclimatising to the user interface over the course of several hours, it occurred to me that the initially overly minimalist controls had caused me to focus more on content and peopleand that is perhaps the biggest success for Ello. Being divorced from organisation and curation causes you to consume and interact far more than you otherwise would.
It's still early days for Ellothe first wave of users are invariably the tinkerers, the explorers, and those most likely to reach out to each other. The marketers will follow close behind, and seek ways through which they might pollute the system with regurgitated content from elsewhere. How Ello, or rather the community deals with the influx of link-bait will be an indicator for it's future. It has a better chance than many systems through it's crowd-sourced indications of of people as “friends”, or “noise”I imagine the data garnered will be used at some point in the future.
I would offer invites (Ello is still invite-only at the time of writing), but have already sent out my initial allocation. In the meantime, feel free to head towards ello.co/jonbeckettand begin exploring!