[BRIEF NOTE] On the debatable future of Ello

[rfmcdonald]

I'm on Ello, @randy_mcdonald. I have only 19 friends there, and activity--mine, theirs--seems to have dwindled. This makes me feel as if the discouraging conclusions of a Charles Arthur article in The Guardian have credence.

Interest in Ello, the ad-free social network posited as a rival to Facebook, seems to be collapsing, according to data from Google Trends.

A graph of searches in the past 30 days on “Ello” shows that after an early peak on 26 September, followed by a higher one on 30 September, the number of searches has now declined to a level almost as low as on 23 September, when the network was just starting to grow.

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Ello opened to the public on 7 August with 90 users on an invite-only basis. By early October it could claim more than 1 million users and to be receiving up to 100,000 invite requests per day.

[. . .]

Interest in Ello, measured in terms of web searches, seems to have peaked at about one-tenth that of Twitter - a relatively high measure, but miniscule compared to Facebook, which garners 95% of searches relating to the three companies over the period, while Twitter gets between 4% and the remaining 5%.

I did hear quite a lot about Ello. How could I not? Half my friends on Facebook are queer and/or arty people, just the sorts of demographics that inclined strongly towards Facebook. There was a lot of talk of adoption, and a lot of interest in the idea. Citylab's Kriston Capps enthused about the modular vision of Ello, as described by its founder Paul Budnitz.

"Look at the iPhone. You get the iPhone, it’s this awesome simple thing. It has most of what you need on it," Budnitz says. But no one leaves it at that. "Almost everyone chooses something that they like—a special map app, a weather app. But the basic iPhone is great!"

Ello is designed to be a microcosm of the iPhone: Users will eventually be able to choose from an "enormous" feature list (if they want). Some of those features will effect the look and feel of Ello, while others will enhance its functionality. For example: Artists, journalists, musicians, and other public professionals may want to have two accounts with one sign-in: one personal, one professional. Pay a buck or two, and you can have that function. Or toggle between two accounts.

Critics aren't convinced this model can work. Appropriately enough, one of the first reports about Ello's first round of venture funding (if not the first report) came from Ello user @waxpancake. "Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values," he observes. (In a followup, @waxpancake clarifies that he hopes Ello succeeds.)

Budnitz pushes back against this criticism. Facebook is a giant company, Budnitz says, because Facebook requires an enormous staff of data analysts, advertisers, and marketers. With a handful of staff, Ello already counts millions of users, and it works—albeit not perfectly in its beta stage.

"We’re going to prove that the Internet doesn’t have to be one giant billboard," Budnitz says. "This company’s Vermont-based. It’s the only state of the union that doesn’t allow billboards."

Over at Towleroad, Charles Pulliam-Moore looked at the queer leanings of Ello, occupying a particular niche.

Ello doesn’t seem to have a means of determining a user’s sexual orientation, but Budnitz has said that his team has seen a particular spike in new LGBT users. According to Budnitz, Ello’s LGBT userbase is playing a “particularly helpful [role] in shaping their development going forward,” which could mean a number of different things.

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As timely as comparisons to Facebook may be, Ello would have a much better shot at becoming the social for edgy, artistic gays by borrowing from Tumblr. Though Tumblr has made a name for itself for being a lightweight, customizable blogging tool for the masses, the service owes a large part of its success to its highly active community of pornography curators.

Tumblr hosts a wide variety of mature content ranging from hardcore, animated gifsets to erotic prose and poetry. Diving into Tumblr’s depths proves not only that Rule 34 is very real, but also that vibrant, engaged non-sexually explicit communities can exist on the same platform as the raunchiest of skin flicks. Straddling that gap could be the key to Ello’s future success.

Boingboing Glen Fleishman suggested, though, that Ello wasn't ready for prime time. The New Yorker's Vauhini Vara also made that point at the end of a sympathetic profile of the company and its ethos.

Did Ello launch too early? Is Facebook too all-encompassing? (I know of no one who left Facebook for Ello.) Or might Ello yet grow to occupy a stable niche?