If Ello is Going to be a Facebook Killer, It Has Some Work to Do

Despite the fact that “Ello” has been making headlines for the past week or more, it wasn’t until just this past weekend that I decided to investigate what it was. When I did, I couldn’t help but want to be part of it. A social network that’s for the greater good? Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?

It should strike no one as a surprise that one of Facebook’s biggest assets is the information it has on its users. It all ties into making money, and displaying relevant advertising. For great reason, many don’t appreciate being tracked, and that’s why a service like Ello has caught the attention of so many up to this point. There’s also the fact that the network won’t have any advertising. A completely free social network is quite ambitious, but in time, the company hopes that it will be able to sell perks to its users that will help offset that missing revenue stream.

Ello’s slogan is “simple, beautiful & ad-free”, and while I’m not entirely sure I agree with the middle bullet-point, the others are certainly true. I was invited to the service this past weekend, and I admit that while my ambitions were sky-high at first, they flattened as soon as I logged in. Granted, this is a beta, but I hadn’t expected something quite so minimalistic – or confusing, for that matter.

Usually I don’t have trouble screenshotting a service to include it in a post, but with Ello, it was challenging to find anything at all that was worth showing. I finally stumbled on the “Noise” section, which is what you see above.

One of Ello’s biggest goals is to lure people over from Facebook, but while Facebook can at times be frustrating to use and understand, it’s not nearly as bad as what I’ve seen with Ello so far. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to make a status (even after clicking the black chat bubble, I could barely see the light-gray arrow that needs to be clicked to publish it), and manage some other extremely simple tasks for that matter. And “beautiful”? I’m not so sure. The font choice might single-handedly ruin that concept for me.

To be fair, Ello is in a very early development stage, and it almost seems as though the invite-only beta was expedited due to the amount of eyeballs that got shifted to it over the past couple of weeks. In case you’re not familiar, Facebook last month required some drag queens to use their real names, and when you’re best-known under an alias, that’s a big problem.

In the span of just a couple of weeks, Ello went from being a totally unknown social network to one that received hundreds of thousands of invite requests per day. With that much hype, it’s hard to not expect big things, but everyone I’ve talked to so far that’s on the service doesn’t find it that compelling. We’re at the stage in the service where it’s the users that have to press hard to get people to join, but the sad fact is, there’s really no reason to yet. There’s not even an option to share a status, which is as basic a feature as it gets.

To prove just how early Ello is in its development, a “Feature List” exists at the top of the page that tells you what’s working, and what’s en route. This is not the kind of thing you’d expect from a service you just joined, and in some ways, I believe this influx of users could end up killing the service before it even has a chance to get off the ground. It simply wasn’t ready yet, not even for a limited beta. There’s no private messaging, no user blocking, and definitely no mobile apps.

Ello clearly faces an uphill battle, and I hope it’s one that it succeeds in overcoming. I might not seem too optimistic about the service right now, but that’s because it’s simply so barebones. It does have great potential, and with the popularity it’s dealing with, there’s no doubt that some features are being expedited as much as possible. These things do take time, and pressure should never force them out sooner (else we wind up with potentially catastrophic bugs).

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting to see where things stand in a month’s time.