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.
I feel like they should rename the Millennials the "Give Up Generation". You guys just take defeatism to 11 every time any tries to say something hopeful for people to start doing what's better for the world. Good grief. Let the poor guy dream for a minute.
Could you explain how idealism and volunteering are mutually inclusive?
I would definitely agree that Millenials are optimistic. About themselves personally. Defeatist about everyone else. That was what I was talking about in the above comment and maybe I should have clarified that more carefully.
We can probably go back and forth for hours on whether I'm being "defeatist" or "realistic". :)
I would love to see positive change in this area, but we need to be aware of what's really important to our intended audience if we're going to try. I could storm off of Facebook and leave a post behind to follow me to my self-hosted Diaspora pod, but I know no one's going to do it, so why bother? My friendships are worth more than my irritation at Facebook-the-company, and I can promise you that the vast majority of users will come to that exact same conclusion. Let's be honest with ourselves about that, before we try to fix this problem. Otherwise we'll only get as far as Diaspora did.
I'll give you an example. 15 years ago most people thought being Vegan was borderline insane outside a couple cities and college towns. There were little if any Vegan options at restaurants and if you asked they often gave a puzzled look. It looked hopeless. I can't tell you how many times I've been yelled at and made fun of. But we didn't do it because we knew it would be successful. We didn't do it to be cool. We did it because we felt it was the right thing to do. We had feelings, and we followed those feelings. We believed in something bigger than ourselves. Fast forward to today. Things look a lot different. Just think about the amount of carbon emissions that did not happen in the last 15 years for that crazy ideal? No one makes the world a better place because they know it will be successful. Or even if any of it is going to work. They do it because the care.
Pragmatism can be a dangerous thing when used as an excuse not to try.
Without remarking on the relative rightness of the moral stands in question, the difference between being vegan and switching to a new social network is that the latter affects people beyond the person making the moral stand. It's perfectly possible to switch by oneself to a free-as-in-freedom social network, but what's the point if no one else does?
And in any case, I'm not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should be respectful of what our audience actually wants as we do. The uphill battle is the social aspect of convincing users that the change is worthwhile, not the technical aspect of building it (which is easy).
That's pretty unfair. Should we label you the WW1 Trench Warfare Generation? Because rushing towards the machine guns might work this time. Heroic, and exceedingly hopeful, but ultimately an utter fail.
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.
You have a good point - the different blogging platforms do a good job. And create virtuous ecosystems around their code in the form of theme creators, hosting providers and consultants.
I think Kenton is onto a winner with Sandstorm - it stands half a chance to actually unify different blogging platforms. So while you may use a different blogging tool and comment - you have a unified email-like identity that follows you between tools, nodes and networks.
I'm doubtful about how long Sandstorm would be able to stay strictly hands-off. Sooner or later everyone who allows random strangers to interact has to get into policing the content and that's nobody's idea of fun.
My girlfriend described protocols to me as "it's like everyone agrees to speak the same language and then you can communicate". Which is a great way to describe it.
When you have to agree to API terms / "rules of the road" in Twitter's legalease / or revocable oauth tokens, things stop being a free language.
Yes, but without these rules, there would be people spamming everyone uncontrollably and wasting resources. Anything with this level of users needs these kinds of rules in place or he service eventually becomes useless.
The oath tokens are there because too many developers don't seem to understand good security practices when storing usernames and passwords
I don't think that creating systems != capitalism. Indeed companies that helped grow ecosystems (like Netscape) have been hugely successful.
I'm guessing this comes down to deciding to create money today to create a legacy later or to creating projects today that go onto become your legacy later. We each strive for what resonates with us and (hopefully) accept others that make different choices in life.
I'd say capitalism is partly responsible, but not completely - IT is not that competitive yet.
I agree with your conclusion; I think it's about deciding not capturing all the value you create, i.e. not being too greedy. Some companies do make this choice, and whole world benefits.
I'm not talking solely about IT. I'm talking about the global ecosystem of capitalism.
There also effects like people who don't dream big because what's more important is ensuring that they can pay the bills; capitalism is also responsible for this, and it has nothing to do with IT.
> I think it's about deciding not capturing all the value you create, i.e. not being too greedy. Some companies do make this choice, and whole world benefits.
The whole world benefits at a cost to the company itself, though. It's not surefire either way, but the company is more likely to survive if it is selfish than if it plays charitably.
Is your company's failure worth the potential benefit to the world? It's easy to say yes from an armchair. It's a lot harder to say yes when the market report is explaining how your competitors are taking advantage of the value you've created to shut you out of the market. Should you still say yes? Probably. Become a Netscape. Fight a losing war against Microsoft and get bought by AOL to become a brand name to fleece the ignorant.
I agree with you strongly. I grew to hate the ecosystem of capitalism for the very reasons you stated.
> The whole world benefits at a cost to the company itself, though. It's not surefire either way, but the company is more likely to survive if it is selfish than if it plays charitably.
Sometimes it's a matter of choosing a business model. There are companies (Basho comes to mind) that do serious open-source work and take money for consulting/support. But I'd hazard a guess such models are only possible because IT is not competitive enough. As competition in any field gets more intense everything tends to degenerate, as those unwilling to sacrifice some value in exchange for profit get outcompeted by those who do. Governments are there to offset some of those problems with regulations, but this has a whole other set of issues.
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 think the benefit of FB was very clear from the beginning: Connect with people from your campus. I remember signing up for that exact reason, beginning of freshman year, after realizing that many other classmates were on it.
Indeed, and I recall there being only rudimentary profiles and I'm not even sure there was messaging functionality. You had to actively visit people's profiles to see what they were up to and had to follow conversations from wall to wall. We all signed up but we jokingly referred to it as Stalkerbook.
In other words, it was nothing like it is today, where it has become a replacement for a bunch of existing things (e.g maintaing address books) and allowed a slew of new things (light touch contact, wider networks and news feeds).
I'm not sure if Ello solves this, but facebook took a really long time to allow _some_ gender-neutral pronouns. Some people would like to define their own.
Also, transgender people had some issues with facebook recently. [1]
Ello lets somewhat older young people (and probably eventually everyone) chat with and follow their friends, acquaintances, and people they find interesting, without needing to use their real identity or make their private data available to advertisers.
The market definitely exists, but is probably quite a bit smaller than the facebook market, and people have tried and failed to tap it in the past. Its time may have come due to the various real name policy backlashes against other services. It's also very possible that it will run into the same brick wall as everyone else who has tried this has.
Regarding number 3, are they actually committed to not data mining their users for commercial purposes? Because if not, they're not selling ads - isn't the incentive to instead sell that data to the highest bidder?
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.
I can understand what Starbucks or Nike are selling... I'm just trying to figure out what exactly Ello is selling. So far, all I can find is "beautiful" and "ad-free."
Standing against commercialism sounds very noble, but a very small percentage of my friends and family care enough about that to jump ship to a new social network.
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.
Under 2/3rds I wonder what would be best long term? A founder owning at least a third could be a problem if when they died, those shares went to someone who was more interested in profit than stated goals. Maybe to get access to the social network you have to buy a share? Spread out the shares to enough individuals and put in language to prevent proxy voting and require a minimum percentage of share holders to vote to change those stated goals?
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.
The investors have to have some way to convert their ownership in the company into liquid assets at some point. Either that's on the open market through an IPO, by another company through an aquisition, or maybe Ello can have enough cash-on-hand to buy back those shares or pay dividends to their investors.
If there's other ways, please tell me; I'm genuinely curious about this! But as far as I can tell, even "run[ning] an actual business" has to have some sort of "exit" for the investors. It's my hope that Ello can buck the "acquire or IPO" trope, but their investors have to be on board with it. And with $5,500,000 invested, even the most patient investors have a limit.
Exit seems to imply the "get rich quick" scenarios of a buyout or IPO. I'm saying an alternative exists: Make money running a business the old fashioned way.
The last company I was a part of had a similar level of investment, and they aren't selling. They aren't looking at an IPO, instead they manage a healthy 20M/year in revenue, with a a healthy profit margin. Not everything is an "exit"
There are many alternatives, none perfect (otherwise everyone would be doing it), but enough to generate income of the company is willing to use a "combined arms" approach.
Donations and t-shirts probably aren't going to be enough to make the investors happy AND keep the whole operation afloat. Investors don't want to just break even, they want to see a big multiple return on their investment.
When even companies like Facebook and Twitter have revenue concerns, I think Ello has an extraordinary task ahead of it.
I'm not saying it's impossible, they could probably find a way to become a break-even business easily, but taking venture capital puts a lot of added pressure on them.
Alternative: A profitable, privately held business. Those are "exits", but you can also run a real business instead of running away with your bag of gold as soon as is possible.
This is your third message saying essentially the same thing, but you still didn't address the key factor here: how will VCs recoup their $5.5M investment? Running a profitable privately held business doesn't return enough multiple to the VCs. Therefore the VCs will need to sell their stock eventually, one way or another (IPO, acquisition).
That being said, I'm not too concerned in that particular case, I don't see Ello going anywhere anyway.
And this is the I don't even know how many'th time someone responds with "They don't get enough money" - How many VCs just flat out lose on an investment? Getting a couple times their money back would probably be just fine with them, especially, like you said, Ello is probably gonna flounder.
It's pretty simple though - you take their investment with the understanding that they want an exit, if you plan to run a stable small business that they can't cash out on instead of angling for an exit, it is unethical at best. I'm all for small businesses, but it's a different investment model.
LOL, This entire thread has me in crying. I think the underpinnings of Color were very ambitious, but the way the product was released was not orchestrated very well.
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)