The Practical Free Spirit

New trendy social media service? Oh yeah, let’s talk about Ello for a bit, shall we?

Ello is the hot social media platform du jour. Some people are saying it could potentially take over for Facebook (especially people who really hate Facebook and who are upset about the legal names thing going on there right now). Some people are saying it could potentially take over for Twitter (especially those who are upset about the new algorithm Twitter has promised is coming that will sort its feed).

My take? It’s way too soon to say, and also, Ello is a bit of a mess right now. Apparently some designers are involved with it, and to say its user interface is not intuitive is probably an understatement. It is difficult to figure out how to do basic things like make a post, reply to a post, and find people. It’s also missing many basic features that we have come to know and love: the ability to share someone else’s posts, the ability to like or favorite a post, privacy and safety settings such as the ability to block a user, non-intrusive notifications, etc. So we’ll have to wait and see how well and how quickly Ello cleans itself up.

I’m also interested in the population that has “seeded” Ello. With Google Plus, Google seeded the service with people their employees invited. Perhaps as a result, the user base of Google Plus skewed heavily male and very technology-based. (Now that it’s been active for more than three years, this might have changed, I’m not sure.) This early community definitely set the “feel” of Google Plus as a site. I don’t know who all is on Ello right now, (the SF/F writers are there experimenting, as we so often are, but ultimately we’re not a huge user group) so I don’t know what “feel” might result from the initial user base, but it will be interesting to watch and see.

My Ello page.

As a content creator, one of my main interests is in figuring out what role (if any) Ello could play in my content strategy. I know a lot of people simply cross-post their content everywhere, but as a content consumer, I dislike this strategy. What makes for a decent to good tweet does not necessarily (or even often) make for a good Facebook post, and having to read the same asinine observation twice does not make me twirl around singing about hills being alive before leaving a nunnery in order to join the domestic labor force.

Instead, my reaction to replicated content tends to vary from the passive zombie stare of apathy, complete with string of drool, to a slight irritation that I am wasting my time and maybe should hide some more posts from my feed. The exception to this? When someone has more substantial content to which they’re cross-linking (a blog post, article, new website, or what-have-you). That I don’t mind as much.

But if I don’t want to merely use Ello as yet another cross-posting ground, the question becomes, what is a good Ello post? To what kind of content does it lend itself? What can I enjoy posting on Ello that I won’t be posting somewhere else? And will the engagement received be worth the time to develop the content? I don’t have answers yet. It depends both on how the technology develops and in what directions the user base grows.

In the meantime, Ello users get to experiment. We get to try lots of different types of content, and we get to accidentally delete the comments on our posts (oops!), and we get to poke and prod and complain about how things work. And we also get the opportunity to begin creating content for a new platform that is not quite as clogged with content as all the older social media sites.

Should writers definitely join Ello right now? Eh. Not yet. You might want to reserve your username of choice in case it really takes off. But for right now, it’s primarily for those of us who enjoy playing in the frontiers of social media.

Interesting in experimenting? You can find me @amysundberg or at this link.