Those of you always looking to be on the cutting edge of whatever new social media people are thinking of next may have heard of Ello. If you haven’t, that’s fine, otherwise this article wouldn’t exist.
Ello is supposedly the new big thing in social networking and prides itself on being “simple, beautiful, and ad-free.” Well, two out of those three things are true. Ello looks simple af and is sort of reminiscent of the good old days of Facebook before the newsfeeds and the little sidebar feeds and all those fucking ads and sponsored posts in the middle of your feeds. Beautiful, it is not. Yes there’s no clutter, but the entire site is just shades of gray, and no that was not supposed to be a 50 Shades reference. The layout is also extremely fucking elementary, to the point that they use Courier New for their font. Courier fucking New. Using a typewriter font for a new social networking site makes about as much sense as drinking iced coffee in the middle of January. Okay, maybe that was a bad example because we actually do that, but you get what I mean: it makes no fucking sense.
One of the betchy things about Ello is that right now you can only make a profile if you’ve been invited. And if there’s anything betches love, it’s exclusivity. Unfortunately like zero people outside the tech world know about Ello so the chances of you getting invited right now are sort of slim. I’ll invite you if you buy me shit.
The site is pretty easy to figure out, there are basically three buttons: Friends (self-explanatory, I hope), Noise, and a lightning bolt. Noise is basically like your Twitter feed or the “explore” section of Instagram (is that what it’s called, that place you go to when you click on the magnifying glass?). For now it just has pics of like trippy artwork and hipster-y T-shirt designs, I really don’t know what any of that signifies so don’t ask me. The lightning bolt is your notifications. For a website that prides itself on being easy to navigate you’d think they’d just label their shit with the appropriate words…
Yes Ello appears very simple, but it’s almost too simple. So simple that I can’t even figure out how to post anything, but I’m not sure if I want to anyway. Sure I could watch the introductory video on the home page, but who the hell has time for that?
My conclusions are as follows:
If you can get someone to invite you to Ello, by all means do it so then if/when it blows up you can say you had it first. Just don’t do it in a hipster-y way, you know how we feel about that. Also, the founders are clearly amazing at talking shit about themselves (in a good way) because I’m really not convinced this site is supposed to be the new Facebook or whatever, rather than just a Xanga that somehow managed to survive til 2015. But then again it’s just in Beta mode so I could be wrong. I sure as shit didn’t predict T-Swift’s quasi-betch approval, so who’s to say I’m right about Ello?
Read more: http://www.betcheslovethis.com/article/wtf-is-ello
WTF Is Ello?
Apps, social network, tech, Technology
No comments:
Post a Comment