Facebook's statement: "Trust us. We'll show you ads."
App.net's statement: "Trust us. We'll charge you so you don't have to see ads."
Ello's statement: "Trust us, we won't show you ads."
The statement we deserve is akin to email's promise: you don't have to trust us; competing providers keep the ecosystem honest. (And the service is federated so you can connect with friends on other services)
Ello strikes me as another silo'd service. What happened to the dream of building "big" services that outlast a single company or team? The 30 year lifespan of SMTP+email, the 20 year life of HTTP, the 10 year life of XMPP.
Today we have users voting with their feet: eg I use Twitter/I stopped using Twitter after they pissed off the developer community.
Wouldn't it be great if we built services where the decision isn't use/don't use, more, my identity follows me to the best service provider (heh, like email!)?
The real statement should be: "you don't have to trust us, this is a protocol: - developers can write services against it, users can choose the developers service they like the best. And when that service goes pop, or the developer moves onto a new project, you are not stranded - just switch providers.
(disclaimer: this stuff makes me angry and we're trying to solve it at Buddycloud Towers)
Today we have users voting with their feet: eg I use Twitter/I stopped using Twitter after they pissed off the developer community.
The fraction of users who actually do this is so tiny that they don't make a dent in Twitter's userbase. The vast majority of users don't care about "trust", or "privacy", or ads, or federation, or API limits, or the ability to leave the provider if it turns evil. They care about where their friends are. That's literally the only feature that draws users in the numbers that make a social network last. I wouldn't expect Ello to be able to convince enough people to join and stay without massive, enthusiastic, engaged adoption -- and what engagement it has is coming from the bandwagon effect, not its promise of no ads.
By the way, remember Diaspora[0]? It's an open-source, federated social network that anyone can host, that requires no trust in any individual provider, and with no ads. It still exists, after attracting quite a lot of attention and Kickstarter funding a few years ago. And it dropped almost entirely off the radar, because its selling points have nothing to do with people's friends actually being there.
Plenty of people do this. It's called blogging. WordPress, Ghost, and so on run on many providers. But social networks are winning the popularity contest.
Perhaps something running on Sandstorm will make it easy enough for people to run their own nodes.
a) after signing up there setting "Allow Ello to gather anonymous information about your visit, which helps us make Ello better. Learn more." defaults to YES.
This from a site that is selling themselves as a privacy conscious is simply comical.
I still don't understand what value Ello brings. It seems to be a social media network for the sake of being a social media network.
Myspace let young people (and then everyone) connect online, share photos, and declare who's their friend.
Facebook let young people (and then everyone) chat with and follow their classmates, and eventually let everyone keep in touch (using that phrase loosely) after graduation.
Ello let's -- uh, let's say tech-savvy 20- and 30-somethings? -- do -- uh, let's say send messages? -- without seeing ads.
The mission statement is equally vague.
"Ello is a simple, beautiful, ad-free social network."
Your descriptions about Myspace and Facebook are post-hoc. It's easy once something grows big to retrospectively say {Service} let {certain people} do {something} in {some way} (e.g. I recall music being a thing for all my friends on Myspace). When something is small, it's not always clear how things will pan out or what direction they may take.
Misson statements are always vague in some sense. "Organise the world's information" was probably strange once upon a time.
I read it as a kind of a second-generation solution: it takes a previously solved problem (a social network) and tries to solve a perceived problem with the existing solutions.
Whether it succeeds or fails will hinge on if there is a market for something that has similar features to Facebook/Twitter but solves a problem that people have been objecting to.
>> Myspace let young people (and then everyone) connect online, share photos, and declare who's their friend.
Don't forget that it also allowed significant customization of user homepages, up to and including embedding music. Sure it got annoying sometimes, but it also added a lot of excitement to the experience. Things felt very... wild wild west.
It allows people to signal that they care about privacy, their data, and stand against commercialism. Both the users, and the operators.
It's like asking "what value does Nike/TapouT/Starbucks logo have?" Sure, you can get better coffee for less, but good coffee is not really what they're selling.
Well, that's interesting, although I'm skeptical. Can anyone with legal experience say exactly how much this means? If Ello genuinely just did something that makes it difficult for future investors/acquirers to turn Ello into a ad-fueled, data-selling, privacy-undercutting behemoth, then that's pretty encouraging.
But ... it just seems "too good to be true." I've expected them to be about as "ad free" as every other business whose initial ideals are abandoned once the founders have gotten theirs and moved on.
IANAL, but the statute this is using is only a year old, so the answer will likely "we can guess, but don't know for sure until there is caselaw behind it"
Until recently most public benefit corporations were specifically chartered by the government (e.g. USPS, CPB), but a number of states have created a law for privately establishing them recently.
Lovely how $5.5M is thrown at a simple CRUD app without revenue, exists due to viral marketing and not even near a stable or representative user base (people want to get in for the sake of being in). How can a social network be invite only? It is the "cool people" table all over again.
Amazing to me that a site that is both hard on the eyes and not nearly as usable as its competitors has raised $5.5M. How do investors think they will make their money back? Simply by microtransactions and paid features? Perhaps the investors are that optimistic, and they think this is the future of social networking.
>>Amazing to me that a site that is both hard on the eyes and not nearly as usable as its competitors has raised $5.5M.
Raising money, at least initially, is about two things: user traction and good PR. I don't know how many users Ello has, but I've personally been hearing about them all over the place, especially from my early-adopter type friends on Facebook. This leads me to believe that the company has a really good PR firm working for them behind the scenes (PG's "submarine" analogy comes to mind).
And the thing is, Ello may be hard on the eyes and not be very usable now, but both of those things are relatively easy to improve. If they do have good user traction, that means they have solved the hardest problem, at least in my opinion. Achieve growth and the rest follows rather naturally.
If I were a Vegas bookie, I'd think Ello has perhaps as high as a one in 10 chance of becoming the next major social network, and on the low end a one in 1,000 chance. A $20M valuation would place them at one 10,000th of Facebook.
Pretty & usable are easily purchased. Throw an expensive dev team at it. Brand and reputation are more difficult.
Is there any other network that has tried this yet? I know Path and other messaging services have done sticker packs But as anyone done full blown features? This may be a crude comparison but I feel like they're trying to bring the concept of IAP for games to social networks.
"which Ello says makes it legally impossible under US law for investors to require Ello to show ads, sell data, or sell the company to any buyer who would violate those conditions"
Quite possibly the silliest thing I've ever seen written in Techcrunch.
Yes, the status is pretty weak if you think of it as some kind of protection from investors. A "public benefit corporation" compared to a regular corporation removes only one specific route investors could use to force a company to do something: a shareholder lawsuit alleging that the company is failing to maximize shareholder value. But in the post-WW2 era, even regular corporations have no legal duty to maximize shareholder value, and can be run according to a number of principles (the belief to the contrary is a mixture of some early 20th century cases combined with a good amount of urban legend about corporate law). Especially considering that nearly anything can be justified as "part of our brand image", and courts aren't interested in second-guessing that: if Ello thinks it's important to its brand image to not show ads, a court is not going to inquire into whether this is a good or bad business decision, regardless of whether it's a public-benefit corporation or a regular one.
All the other ways investors could force a corporation to do something, such as pressuring the board, voting in directors, voting on shareholder resolutions, etc. remain available. If the investors think Ello should show ads, or should sell to Google, or anything else, they have good ways of making that happen (given sufficient share ownership/etc.).
A benefit corp can always vote to remove its benefit corp status. If a majority of the ownership goes to investors, they can vote to revoke the no advertising clause.
Public Benefit Corporations really don't have teeth, at least as far as I am aware.
According to the Delaware Public Benefit Corporation rules it requires a two thirds majority of share holders to change status. If that is held up by the courts it's some teeth but not absolute protection against change.
Ello is demonstrating something important - you can now undercut "free with ads" on price. How much, per user, does it really cost to run a social network now? Not much. Hosting is so cheap that Atlantic will rent you a full-time virtual machine for $0.99/month. Ello's actual computing cost is probably less than that.
Selling ads is expensive. A majority of Google's headcount is ad sales reps. The main search engine, a few years ago, was developed and run by about 90 people, I was told by an ex-Google employee. Google probably spends far more running the ad side of the business than the search side.
Craigslist has 40 employees, and they've been able to crush the newspaper classified advertising industry. They charge for a few categories of listings. That's enough to keep them going.
At some point, users sense that there are too many ads. Myspace went there when they had a revenue drop and tried to make up for it by increasing the ad density. Big mistake. Myspace usage went into a screaming dive and never pulled out.
The big ad-supported web-based businesses are fighting Moore's Law. What they do is getting cheaper, but their price, in terms of ad density, isn't going down to match. That makes them vulnerable. There's hundreds of billions in market cap out there just waiting to be destroyed.
The overall sentiment of your post is correct...you can run a social network cheaper than FB if you're not concerned about profit(note that PBC is still "for profit").
> How much, per user, does it really cost to run a social network now? Not much.
That's a broad brush.
> Hosting is so cheap that Atlantic will rent you a full-time virtual machine for $0.99/month.
If you're serious about uptime/failover/any sort of SLA this figure is totally meaningless.
> A majority of Google's headcount is ad sales reps.
Because they produce the revenue :)
> The main search engine, a few years ago, was developed and run by about 90 people
Their salaries are minuscule compared to the millions/billions it takes to keep the datacenters that serve search running. Not to mention that the 90 people figure doesn't(can't) include things like network engineers, hardware engineers, capacity, provisioning, monitoring, cloud infra, etc. There are LOTS of supporting actors that aren't directly on the "search" team.
This is the beauty of technology. The size of the engineering team does not scale linearly with the size of the userbase. e.g. you can have a relatively small team of engineers write code that is used by billions of people. In contrast, a sales team will scale linearly with revenue. More sales people = more revenue, all other things being equal. Thus you see large sales headcounts at these companies pushing ads to people.
It all sounds nice, but we all know there's always two end senarios if their service takes off... They grow a user base, get shot a NSL: 1) Keep the success rolling and continue on business as usual while their naive users are data farmed. 2) Pull a lavabit.
Think we all know senario two is unlikely. I'll stay away from social media for the time being, perhaps until some decentralized mesh net encrypted p2p service becomes a reality. 2020?
Note that the Twitter response to this news is generally "wait, Ello still exists?"
Additionally, let's say they'll make their money through subscriptions instead of display ads. Then they can just adjust the UI/UX to push toward subscriptions, which will result in the problem that Ello had claimed to be solving. The $5.5M has to result in an exit, somehow, and therefore the incentives between business and consumer are misaligned.
[+] [-] imaginator|11 years ago|reply
App.net's statement: "Trust us. We'll charge you so you don't have to see ads."
Ello's statement: "Trust us, we won't show you ads."
The statement we deserve is akin to email's promise: you don't have to trust us; competing providers keep the ecosystem honest. (And the service is federated so you can connect with friends on other services)
Ello strikes me as another silo'd service. What happened to the dream of building "big" services that outlast a single company or team? The 30 year lifespan of SMTP+email, the 20 year life of HTTP, the 10 year life of XMPP.
Today we have users voting with their feet: eg I use Twitter/I stopped using Twitter after they pissed off the developer community.
Wouldn't it be great if we built services where the decision isn't use/don't use, more, my identity follows me to the best service provider (heh, like email!)?
The real statement should be: "you don't have to trust us, this is a protocol: - developers can write services against it, users can choose the developers service they like the best. And when that service goes pop, or the developer moves onto a new project, you are not stranded - just switch providers.
(disclaimer: this stuff makes me angry and we're trying to solve it at Buddycloud Towers)
[+] [-] mithaler|11 years ago|reply
The fraction of users who actually do this is so tiny that they don't make a dent in Twitter's userbase. The vast majority of users don't care about "trust", or "privacy", or ads, or federation, or API limits, or the ability to leave the provider if it turns evil. They care about where their friends are. That's literally the only feature that draws users in the numbers that make a social network last. I wouldn't expect Ello to be able to convince enough people to join and stay without massive, enthusiastic, engaged adoption -- and what engagement it has is coming from the bandwagon effect, not its promise of no ads.
By the way, remember Diaspora[0]? It's an open-source, federated social network that anyone can host, that requires no trust in any individual provider, and with no ads. It still exists, after attracting quite a lot of attention and Kickstarter funding a few years ago. And it dropped almost entirely off the radar, because its selling points have nothing to do with people's friends actually being there.
[0] https://joindiaspora.com/
[+] [-] skybrian|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps something running on Sandstorm will make it easy enough for people to run their own nodes.
[+] [-] Jonovono|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeoxic|11 years ago|reply
I really wish XMPP was more prominent than it is. It's an incredibly powerful protocol.
[+] [-] prezjordan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|11 years ago|reply
Capitalism.
[+] [-] jnsaff2|11 years ago|reply
a) after signing up there setting "Allow Ello to gather anonymous information about your visit, which helps us make Ello better. Learn more." defaults to YES.
This from a site that is selling themselves as a privacy conscious is simply comical.
b) https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ello.co
- SHA1 cert
- No FS
- Defaults to RC4
Their ops team has not paid attention to properly configuring TLS. Not encouraging at all.
If anyone at Ello is reading this there is an excellent resource for securing your TLS setup at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS
[+] [-] ddw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gk1|11 years ago|reply
Myspace let young people (and then everyone) connect online, share photos, and declare who's their friend.
Facebook let young people (and then everyone) chat with and follow their classmates, and eventually let everyone keep in touch (using that phrase loosely) after graduation.
Ello let's -- uh, let's say tech-savvy 20- and 30-somethings? -- do -- uh, let's say send messages? -- without seeing ads.
The mission statement is equally vague.
"Ello is a simple, beautiful, ad-free social network."
[+] [-] amirmc|11 years ago|reply
Misson statements are always vague in some sense. "Organise the world's information" was probably strange once upon a time.
[+] [-] lobotryas|11 years ago|reply
1. They let you choose any name you want (none of the "real name" stuff)
2. They are very friendly, focused and responsive to the needs of LGBT community
3. No ads (and thus less incentive to data mine the users, one hopes)
4. They simply don't have the history of Facebook and co
5. At least right now they are young, hip and very exclusive with invite-only membership (unlike Facebook that has everyone AND your grandma)
[+] [-] ijk|11 years ago|reply
Whether it succeeds or fails will hinge on if there is a market for something that has similar features to Facebook/Twitter but solves a problem that people have been objecting to.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
Don't forget that it also allowed significant customization of user homepages, up to and including embedding music. Sure it got annoying sometimes, but it also added a lot of excitement to the experience. Things felt very... wild wild west.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
It's like asking "what value does Nike/TapouT/Starbucks logo have?" Sure, you can get better coffee for less, but good coffee is not really what they're selling.
[+] [-] ryanpardieck|11 years ago|reply
But ... it just seems "too good to be true." I've expected them to be about as "ad free" as every other business whose initial ideals are abandoned once the founders have gotten theirs and moved on.
[+] [-] aidenn0|11 years ago|reply
Until recently most public benefit corporations were specifically chartered by the government (e.g. USPS, CPB), but a number of states have created a law for privately establishing them recently.
[+] [-] pearjuice|11 years ago|reply
Looking forward to the billion dollar valuations.
[+] [-] SomeCollegeBro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
Raising money, at least initially, is about two things: user traction and good PR. I don't know how many users Ello has, but I've personally been hearing about them all over the place, especially from my early-adopter type friends on Facebook. This leads me to believe that the company has a really good PR firm working for them behind the scenes (PG's "submarine" analogy comes to mind).
And the thing is, Ello may be hard on the eyes and not be very usable now, but both of those things are relatively easy to improve. If they do have good user traction, that means they have solved the hardest problem, at least in my opinion. Achieve growth and the rest follows rather naturally.
[+] [-] j10t|11 years ago|reply
Pretty & usable are easily purchased. Throw an expensive dev team at it. Brand and reputation are more difficult.
[+] [-] TarpitCarnivore|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reduce|11 years ago|reply
Quite possibly the silliest thing I've ever seen written in Techcrunch.
[+] [-] _delirium|11 years ago|reply
All the other ways investors could force a corporation to do something, such as pressuring the board, voting in directors, voting on shareholder resolutions, etc. remain available. If the investors think Ello should show ads, or should sell to Google, or anything else, they have good ways of making that happen (given sufficient share ownership/etc.).
[+] [-] bgun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iancarroll|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gault8121|11 years ago|reply
Public Benefit Corporations really don't have teeth, at least as far as I am aware.
[+] [-] BashiBazouk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
Selling ads is expensive. A majority of Google's headcount is ad sales reps. The main search engine, a few years ago, was developed and run by about 90 people, I was told by an ex-Google employee. Google probably spends far more running the ad side of the business than the search side.
Craigslist has 40 employees, and they've been able to crush the newspaper classified advertising industry. They charge for a few categories of listings. That's enough to keep them going.
At some point, users sense that there are too many ads. Myspace went there when they had a revenue drop and tried to make up for it by increasing the ad density. Big mistake. Myspace usage went into a screaming dive and never pulled out.
The big ad-supported web-based businesses are fighting Moore's Law. What they do is getting cheaper, but their price, in terms of ad density, isn't going down to match. That makes them vulnerable. There's hundreds of billions in market cap out there just waiting to be destroyed.
[+] [-] rco8786|11 years ago|reply
> How much, per user, does it really cost to run a social network now? Not much.
That's a broad brush.
> Hosting is so cheap that Atlantic will rent you a full-time virtual machine for $0.99/month.
If you're serious about uptime/failover/any sort of SLA this figure is totally meaningless.
> A majority of Google's headcount is ad sales reps.
Because they produce the revenue :)
> The main search engine, a few years ago, was developed and run by about 90 people
Their salaries are minuscule compared to the millions/billions it takes to keep the datacenters that serve search running. Not to mention that the 90 people figure doesn't(can't) include things like network engineers, hardware engineers, capacity, provisioning, monitoring, cloud infra, etc. There are LOTS of supporting actors that aren't directly on the "search" team.
This is the beauty of technology. The size of the engineering team does not scale linearly with the size of the userbase. e.g. you can have a relatively small team of engineers write code that is used by billions of people. In contrast, a sales team will scale linearly with revenue. More sales people = more revenue, all other things being equal. Thus you see large sales headcounts at these companies pushing ads to people.
[+] [-] smacktoward|11 years ago|reply
How much, per user, does it cost to run a social network? Not much.
How much, per user, does it cost to run a social network at scale? Quite a bit more.
[+] [-] vesche|11 years ago|reply
Think we all know senario two is unlikely. I'll stay away from social media for the time being, perhaps until some decentralized mesh net encrypted p2p service becomes a reality. 2020?
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
Additionally, let's say they'll make their money through subscriptions instead of display ads. Then they can just adjust the UI/UX to push toward subscriptions, which will result in the problem that Ello had claimed to be solving. The $5.5M has to result in an exit, somehow, and therefore the incentives between business and consumer are misaligned.
[+] [-] 67726e|11 years ago|reply
Or maybe they'll run an actual business, instead of the startup pump-and-dump. Not every success story has to be "an exit"
[+] [-] jscheel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] th0br0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolev|11 years ago|reply