The Ello Bill of Rights
Who remembers “Ello”? They were the anti-facebook that appeared on the internet about 12 months ago, and became the darling of the tech journalists for a few days. They promised freedom from the various shackles imposed by Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and all the other big-name communication platforms.
I would like to write the line “Ello are back”, but they never really went away. I do wonderif theymight make it after all though. They have released a “Bill of Rights” for the users of their platform that makes refreshing reading when compared against the behaviour of the big social networks. Think about it -Facebook and Twitter's infrastructure is not worth their multi-billion dollar valuations – we are.
Rather than re-print their Bill of Rights, visit their site (https://bill-of-rights.ello.co/) and read it for yourself.
Will Ello make it? If they don't it won't be their own fault – it will be the fault of you and me – and the general internet populance. I know, because I've walked the same path.
I built a prototype social network a couple of years ago single handed, mainly to address the common complaints I had heard of friends using Tumblr. I took elements of Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Pinterest to make something not entirely dissimilar to Ello. It had asymmetric friending, the option of friends only posts, markdown syntax, and a view of the firehose (which nobody seems keen on doing).
One day – about a week after the first elements went online – Tumblr went down. In the few hours that Tumblr was down, fifteen thousands people flooded in – thankfully my code stood up.
When Tumblr came back up, as quickly as everybody appeared, everybody wandered away again. Within 24 hours I had a ghost-town on my hands once more.
It was a huge lesson about the power of marketing – kind of validating the story that we've heard again and again over the years – the old “Betamax versus VHS” story – even Windows versus OS/2.
Anyway – good luck to Ello. Let's hope they find a way of making the system pay for itself before their runway of cash runs down. Their ideals and goals make an awful lot of sense – if they will make any difference at all is another story entirely.