Ello, the social network at odds with Facebook, released its official “bill of rights” recently, a document setting the site’s principles in stone. It’s reached just over 30,000 signatories.
As it has trumpeted since launch last year, Ello is the ad-free social network. “You are not a product” it proudly says, flying in the face of the mass tracking of users by Facebook in order to sell premium targeted advertising. As the world obsesses more and more about data (and what happens to it), users have become increasingly aware that they’re being monitored by the sites they use but they haven’t really changed their actions online in response, at least not in a significant way.
Ello wanted to change that and its bill of right lays out a few more detailed points about what your social network should be. You have a right to not be tracked, you are entitled to privacy, you have a right to permanently delete your account. These are all admirable points and ones that most will agree with. Ello says it doesn’t tinker with algorithms in its feed, it’s all linear and chronological, unlike Facebook plucking out the top posts and stories for you. Despite all these hallmarks, Ello hasn’t even come close to grabbing a firm place in the social media landscape.
It was in September of last year, not long after it launched, that Ello seemingly exploded online, garnering huge media attention. At the time, Facebook had been contending with issues around its policy for real names whereas Ello allows you to use a pseudonym.
It’s the ad-free philosophy though that is Ello’s lifeblood but after September, things have been very quiet. The sudden rush of users coming to social network caught Ello off guard, says CEO and founder Paul Budnitz, leading them to make the site invite-only for a while to make sign-ups more manageable.
“We did our best to slow things and gives ourselves time to develop it,” says Paul.
“We’re in the millions of users, we don’t publish actual user numbers,” he says of where Ello stands currently.
From social network to e-commerce
Initially Ello’s only identity was that it was ad-free with a different attitude to data than heavyweights like Facebook. Since it’s time in the sun, the small team of 17 behind Ello has had a rethink of what the social network is and who it’s for.
“We actually aren’t or never have tried to create another Facebook. We’re building a network for creators and creative people and that can be pretty broad,” says Paul. “Most of us are designers and artists so we really wanted Ello to have a creative flavor to it.”
Now through funding they raised since last year, Ello is adding new features with the eventual goal of turning the site into an e-commerce platform of sorts.
“A lot of people who make stuff, whether it’s a photographer or an artist or a musician or a maker or whatever, have something to sell so what we’re going to is later this year introduce commerce.
The idea says Paul is to create a network for creatives to connect with fans and give them an avenue to sell their work to those fans. “I own a bicycle company too so we’ll be able to sell bicycles directly to people that follow us,” he says.
“We’re going to take a tiny transaction charge for listing something for sale.” No price has been set yet but he suggests that it may be something around a 99c charge to list an item.
The CEO is critical of the so-called “pay to play” methods used by Facebook where brands or companies may have large numbers of likes or followers but need to pay a fee for posts to reach the maximum number of news feeds. It’s become particularly troublesome for small businesses and artists with limited budgets for advertising and marketing.
“On Facebook, you have to pay to reach your fans. You could have 10,000 people following and you could post something and unless you pay the network, almost none of them see the post, they just don’t appear.
“We have a lot of musicians and bands, so you’ll be able to buy concert tickets and follow someone on tour. We’re really enabling the creative person more or less.”
Like most things about Ello, it’s a work in progress, and developing the social network’s Android app is next on the agenda. The shopping features will be rolled out later this year or possibly early next year. Some features take extra time to refine, says Paul.
Data & privacy
While Ello has tried to differentiate itself from Facebook through ad-free experiences and now ecommerce, it still has to deal with user data and how it handles that data.
Everything you publish on Ello is public and the only data that isn’t displayed is your email address and password. This may eventually change, says Paul, as Ello is looking at introducing private messaging too.
“We’re not tracking you when you surf around the web. However we do collect some data,” Paul explains. This includes data on what features you’re using in order to give the developers an insight into what’s working and what’s not.
Users have the option in their settings for turning off any tracking as well as being able to download the entire data base of what Ello has on them. “You can turn that off and we don’t track your behavior at all,” says Paul. “You can see what we’re holding and I think the differentiator there is that every other social network [is] collecting data and selling it. The data they collect on you belongs to them. You don’t know what data they have collected on you.”
Ello also gives users the option of permanently deleting their account, unlike the Facebook option of disabling your account and returning to it in the future if you wish. Ello keeps a backup of your profile for a “limited time” according to the CEO.
“That’s been varying so I don’t want to make a promise on how long that is,” he says. “We’ve been shortening the time we feel we need to hold backups and deleting them after that.”
Ello wants to put the responsibility on the user over how much data they share. Users don’t have to use their real names, which was one of the features that garnered it so much attention last year. You can become a different person, says Paul.
Managing the trolls
These policies may feed the creative nature of the people that Ello is now targeting but raises questions around cyberbullying, trolling, and illegal content.
The social network complies with all laws on the matter, says Paul, and will remove any illegal content such as copyright infringements or more serious cases like child pornography.
“I won’t say it’s troll free or anything like that. It really can’t be but we created a bunch of tools like blocking and muting,” he says, describing the environment on the site as “crazy positive”.
“Ello does have rules. We don’t allow abusive behavior, we don’t allow hate of certain kinds, we do not censor adult content, we don’t allow inciting of violence. If and when we discover that, we have a team of people dedicated to dealing with that,” says the CEO.
“We also have reporting mechanisms. Ello has turned out to be fairly self-policed. If someone is doing something really bad, it tends to get reported by multiple people really fast. We will either work with the person doing the bad stuff or shut down their account if we need to. It’s not perfect and it can’t be. Look at Twitter.”
All of this data may be out in the open and Ello may track very little about its users but if it were to ever receive a request from authorities, how does it react? It’s a regular discussion for the likes of Facebook and Twitter and has led to regular transparency reports from many major sites.
“So far there hasn’t been [a request], I can tell you that,” says Paul. As everything is public on Ello, the data is unlikely to be of interest to authorities, he believes.
“I think the data on Ello is either not very interesting to those types of organizations or is anything you couldn’t find out by just browsing Ello. There aren’t a lot of secrets, we’re not tracking you. We keep anonymized data about people but it’s hashed and anonymized before we put it on to our server so quite frankly, I think that we’re going to remain one of the least interesting places to garner data. I’m sure telephone records are much more interesting.”