When you're comparing your user engagement to Google+, you know things are not going well. They don't call G+ a ghost town for nothing.
Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice for long blog posts?
I use both sites extensively, and have investigated activity and engagement on both. I'm the source of a fair bit of the G+ ghost-town press coverage. That said, there's more to a community than simple size (take HN as an example).
I also disagree with many of Ello's styling decisions (and G+'s for that matter). My Ello CSS revise: http://stylebot.me/styles/9519
(That only works on logged-in sessions, unauthenticated still uses the earlier Ello v1 style.)
6-10k DAU? That seems minuscule to me. Also, shows how skewed is HN viewpoint: although by these parameters, Ello is tiny, everyone knows about it, while other application and games that are used by thousands amount of people are completely unknown.
First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University....
Ello's got at least that many daily actives, and about 200k monthlies. That's much larger than Facebook's founding class, though also a different mix.
It's also worth realizing that many influential online communities were very small relative to their impact. The WELL and Usenet had core userbases in the tens of thousands of users, best I can make out.
I'd chalk Ello's exposure up to a few factors. One was the whole "David vs. Goliath" meme that struck when Ello was first revealed. World+dog are trying to figure out how to take on Facebook, and that's how the story was pitched. Ello's leadership makes quite clear that's not their take on things. Another was that, at least for a time, Ello had attracted quite the credible crowd. Clay Shirky, Charlie Stross, Bruce Sterling Paul Mason (UK/BBC journalist), Quinn Norton, Meredith Patterson, Tim Bray, danah boyd, Jonathan Zittrain, and others all created accounts, some posted for a while, a few still do.
It was too early. I've posted a few long lists of features Ello desperately needed to be viable, and lack of those, along with various bugs, were really hampering it.
While it's still got some technical shortcomings, the team's been addressing them quickly, doing a good job of it, and surprising me with some quite ingenious (and not always technical) solutions to problems or ways of offering capabilities. And they've directly addressed most of my major issues. That responsiveness has been notably missing at Google.
The site also has quite the creative set present, which tends to be a good early adopter set -- think artist colony.
But technical features and a cool vibe aren't enough. Though they're a good start. I'm encouraged by the feature set, community, leadership, direction, and foundations. Rather more so than by a few other systems -- G+ was already faltering badly in its first months out of the gate, Ello's avoided those faux pax entirely.
I'm also getting some sense of the HN effect: a front-page placement seems to be good for about 3.5k hits in 3 hours or so, based on this item.
I'm assuming you work at Ello, which makes it surprising that you didn't mention the LGBTQ community which seemed (and still seems) to be the driving force behind most user adoption after the initial first wave of users. This coincided with the backlash against G+ for forcing users to use their real names/photos, which was a touchy subject in a lot of queer communities.
Beyond that, there was a rather large social media "landgrab" when Ello first hit mainstream circles where popular social media personalities claimed both accounts with their usual pseudonyms and also the pseudonyms of friends and rivals (as both jokes and pranks).
Both sources of growth don't seem sustainable, has there been any organic community growth from within Ello from either one of those groups? That would be a much stronger indicator of future success to me than a comparison with 2004 Facebook.
No, I don't. Just one of the early (Sept., 2014) adopters.
The analysis I'm presenting of Ello activity, as my earlier G+ analysis, is based entirely on publicly visible characteristics and my inferences based on them.
I did join Ello during the genderqueer rush, though that's not a community I identify with. My comments at the time were along the lines of "artists and drag queens is as good a foundation community as any". Influence of the group as a whole seems to have leveled off a bit, though Ello's currently celebrating Pride, with a post on that topic from Paul Budnitz today:
And yes, a lot of notables grabbed their Ello seats, a few spoof accounts were set up (the Zuckerberg one may still be active).
I don't have any access to user numbers and haven't looked into building those, though the Ello crew have talked of growth and a few notable spurts. As I've noted elsewhere in this thread, I've seen both a lot of attrition of early accounts and new arrivals. I noted the same trend on G+ (and did a major housecleaning at one point of long-dead profiles from my circles there).
The FB comparison has far more to do with what that group represented than how large it was. Dynamics of online community growth (and decline) are fascinating -- I've been watching online communities develop, grow, and decline for nearly 30 years. Harvard students (or grads) are an attractive social cohort, it's an easy base to grow if you play your cards right. That was FB's strength. Now it's the overall size of the social graph, but they're vulnerable to defections and evaporative cooling effects given that, by definition, most members aren't high-social-status:
Colleges and creatives make good seeds, though they're not perfect. Balancing out traits within communities helps a lot -- e.g., geeks can be level-headed and realistic, but may lack enthusiasm or interpersonal engagement other groups can bring (I generally identify geek myself). Finding and cultivating the righ mix is an art, but it can be exceptionally powerful.
People are not gonna leave Facebook anytime soon, sorry. I am very open-minded and I won't either - I can only imagine the more conservative or those who don't know about alternatives. It took many years for people to switch from email to Facebook - I'm sure most of them won't "invest" time in anything else. The "social network" is where your friends are and most of mine are on Facebook, so, I have no choice pretty much.
Yes, but the person who would disregard TheFacebook based on this data would be completely rational and making the right decision. There were a lot of websites with this DAU, a lot of very ambitious startups; almost none succeeded.
If we are making comparisons with TheFacebook early days, we have to look at different data, that set apart TheFacebook from competitors then: K factor, session length, various engagement metrics of individual user. But they are not discussed in this post, so we can not draw such comparisons. From data that we do have, Ello doesn't seem to be any close to TheFacebook than to any of those thousands of perished start-ups.
> First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University....
You can't compare user activity/behavior in 2015 with user activity/behavior in 2004.
It's not fair to trivialize the traction that services like Ello are able to get. It's really hard to gain any ground when something is dependent on network effects, especially in a field as competitive as social networking. 6-10k sounds like a perfectly reasonable base to me, and with that inertia, there's no reason to believe it won't continue to grow. All businesses start somewhere (generally much lower than 6-10k, as Ello surely did), even the business that will eventually outcompete Facebook.
Ello's DAU is down from 6 months ago. They may be trending up locally, but most of us who gave them a shot when they launched found the site ugly, unusable (buggy, impossible to find friends), and unneeded. I know roughly 4 dozen folks that gave Ello a shot and all of us have not been back.
Facebook launched against extant MySpace, which had tremendous initial advantage.
My point isn't that Ello will clobber FB. That's not the stated goal of its founders. But a modest initial community can grow. The selection of the early adopter class is far more important than its size.
My point is that you can't simply use historical data and events to justify data and behaviors half a decade later because the market is completely and utterly different.
Unlike the Facebook/Myspace era, social networks are a dime a dozen, with most receiving a little traction and news articles, and then dying soon after. You could use the same arguments you've presented for the inevitable "success" of Google+, and look what happened there.
Very true. I was overjoyed when I had 400-600 readers on my blog back in 2001, I still get interviewed for being one of the first bloggers in my country back then.
Now I have more followers on Instagram and it's like... whatever, it's a drop in the bucket.
Update: I checked it out again. It's improved a tiny bit, but still isn't good UI design at all. All those tiny icons that expand with a mouse hover - annoying and not accessible. I still can't easily find several things I can easily do on Facebook (despite Facebook's terrible UI and menu options). Not usable for someone used to Facebook or Google+.
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Actually, for the life of me, I struggle anytime I login to Ello and have to hunt for how to logout. The half page banner (some translucent stuff to scroll through) of whatever on top doesn't make things easier to know about either. The whole UI is completely unintuitive, quite bland and too minimalistic to figure things out. So I stopped checking it several months ago. The privacy part is very nice and very welcome, because of which I had a lot of hope on the platform. But Ello was (or probably still is) nowhere close to Facebook or Google+ in terms of UI and usability. Try pushing a novice user from either of the big platforms into Ello and watch the person struggle. One's social graph being in some other walled garden is just one piece of the problem in trying to move users to something else. But that something else needs to be an intuitive and viable alternative in the first place.
P.S.: I'm not a tech newbie.
P.P.S.: I try to push people I know to better (if not the best) platforms and services when it comes to privacy.
I haven't checked it out in awhile, but the last time I did, I also remember not being able to find the Logout functionality.
"I'm not a tech newbie." <-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery" of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and frustrating.
I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to experiment and be different.
The logout function's been moved around a bit, it's currently under the "More" inverted caret ("∨") glyph in the Omnibar (top bar).
I do tend to agree that the interface is a tad _too_ minimal. Tooltips have recently been added.
Arguably, Ello misuses the hamburger as well.
Behind the scenes though, the styling's very clean. Icons are all SVG and could be resized (or re-coloured) with a CSS tweak. CSS and HTML are both quite clean, and restyling the site (I do it for my own use) is trivial.
Some small-sample usability testing likely would be a really good idea.
Holding up G+ as a paragon of UI design jars with me. There is _so_ much wrong with that site. And its guts are a goddamned disaster (Closure's CSS minification hashing is a crime against humanity).
Also, I suspect that the release of mobile apps (supposedly this spring) will be a huge boost for them. I know that I would be checking in on activity there much more if I could do it on my phone.
Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice for long blog posts?