Community managers, marketers, PR pros and yes even journalists all have a collective obsession with new and shiny things. Over the last couple of weeks, a new social network started to create some buzz. The social media site is called Ello, and it’s claiming to be the “anti-Facebook.”
Ello says it is “free-to-use,” “ad-free” and they even have their manifesto right on their homepage.
So as the curious community manager that I am, I decided to buck up, put my personal thoughts aside (with how contradictory those three phrases are) and test out this new social media site. (Sidenote: here’s my Ello profile.)
My initial thoughts are that I think Ello is trying so hard to be different than Facebook that the overall user experience suffers. The platform isn’t as intuitive as it could be. I found myself wasting a lot of time trying to find and/or get things to work that should be easy no brainers.
- The search is buggy and doesn’t always work in Chrome.
- Posting and replying to comments is not as intuitive as it could. I accidentally wound up deleting my first comment and reply because the labels for post and delete are not clearly marked.
- When I wanted to log out the first time, it was like going on a minor scavenger hunt. (FYI: the logout screen is hidden underneath settings. 🙁 )
I realize I’m an early adopter, and have more patience and desire to try and make new sites work. But, my gut tells me anybody, who isn’t an early adopter, would give up on Ello within 60 second. It’s just not a great user experience.
But, I didn’t just want to stop with my thoughts on Ello. So, I asked a lot of my fellow community builders and enthusiasts for their opinions. Here’s what a few of them had to say.
“Deeply flawed model, terrible UX, basically pointless,” said Dave Briggs, who founded Work Smart HQ. “Otherwise great.”
“I am…and so far, meh.” said Maggie McGary, who is a digital comms pro. “When you first sign up and friend people, their posts prior to you joining don’t show up in your stream, so you’re just looking at a blank screen wondering “now what?” Or at least, I was. Today it’s marginally better–but I guess I’m so conditioned to either like or favorite or retweet that I feel like I should be doing something other than just scrolling down a page–not feeling inspired enough to comment on anything so far.”
“Yes… reminds me of Twitter 06,” said Ashley Kingsley, who is a digital marketer. “So quiet… and unassuming. They don’t have a call to action…which I think is turning people off.”
“My friend Lynne has some great thoughts on this here.” said Sheena Medina, who is the digital strategist at Skilled Up. “Among the many questions are, “In joining Ell are we really hoping to see and experience something different than we did in the past? Then we shouldn’t be only following the same people that we always follow. We shouldn’t be using it or expecting it to be used just like we use Tumblr, or Twitter, or Facebook, et al. What did you come here in hopes of finding?”
“Is it safe to confess that I’m not in yet?” said Scott Moore, who co-founded Communl. “Haven’t really tried largely because I’m jaded. I think we are seeing a recurring story: some small SNS attracts a crowd which attracts some attention which builds into hype as media seeks the next new distraction. There are hundreds of small social networking sites and it’s mostly luck that ello bubbled up to broader attention. I mean, why ello and not diaspora (which has been around longer, is all cloud-y, and now wholly developed by its own community)?”
It’s safe to say the reviews I have seen have been pretty mixed. What are your thoughts on Ello? Have you joined? Why or not? Please leave your comments in the comment section below.
[…] glance, I didn’t want to like this app. I have written more than a couple of times about social media shiny object syndrome. Most of the sites that make an initial splash wear off and fade into relative obscurity within a […]