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Ello Formally Promises To Remain Ad-Free, Raises $5.5M
Social media site Ello is presented as the anti-Facebook, promising an ad-free social network, and that they won't sell private data. Today, they've also announced that Ello has become a Public Benefit Corporation, and that the site's anti-advertising promise has been enshrined in a corporate charter. The BBC reports on the restrictions that Ello has therefore entered into, which mean the site cannot, for monetary gain,
- Sell user-specific data to a third party
- Enter into an agreement to display paid advertising on behalf of a third party; and
- In the event of an acquisition or asset transfer, the Company shall require any acquiring entity to adopt these requirements with respect to the operation of Ello or its assets.
While that might turn off some potential revenue flows (the company says it will make money by selling optional features), as the linked article points out, it hasn't turned off investors; Ello has now raised $5.5 million from investors.
... and they still haven't figured out that monospaced fonts aren't "beautiful" for blocks of text.
I would imagine it's down to too few people being on it still. There was such initial hype for it, then nothing. How long do you suppose people will wait before just not bothering with it?
That it is easy enough to work around such promises. (Not saying Ello would do that, just saying this depends on their intentions not on these promises)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
So it's trying to be Google+ without the popularity? Oh, but pay for aspects of it directly?
I don't see this business model of theirs being sustainable. Not to mention nobody in their right mind is going to want to acquire them with these restrictions bolted on.
Wow, they formally promised.
Is a formal promise more legally binding than a non-formal promise? Is it transferable and binding to someone who subsequently buys Ello?
It sounds good in principle, but is it really legally binding in any sense?
As always, I remain skeptical about such things ... because time and time again companies have reneged on such promises. Or after they've gone through bankruptcy/get sold the new owner simply ignores any of these things.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Do their statutes forbid that?
Ironic: when you "OK" the manifesto...it invites you to "Share the manifesto" on Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Google+, Tumblr, Reddit and LinkedIn.
Never underestimate the ability of businessmen to weasel out of prior social commitments for their own benefit.
Some really dumb investors. Ello looks like something I could write in PHP in about a day for $100 bucks.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
n/c
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The page also has Google Analytics tracking bugs in it.
What I'd like to see in the near future is the concept of social media turned into an open standard (much like e-mail) and built out as a non-centralized, distributed network, with DNS controlling which server(s) power which domains. Your social network domain could either be a stand-alone domain (think an internal site for businesses, schools, etc), or it could be hooked into the greater social network, where status updates, messages, etc could propagate between domains and, depending on who your friends with, you would get those updates to show up on your own feed. I'd really like to see a standard drawn up, and then have there be many implementations (ideally open source) of the actual software used to power each social network domain (like XMPP implementations).
With social media becoming such a huge part in a lot of peoples' everyday lives, it really is about time to open it up and stop having it controlled by any single entity.
And it serves up data from cloudfront, which is just a front end for Amazon's analytics, isn't it?
It also makes references to integrating with YouTube, and doing an auto-push to "other" networks (which I assume is the list you gave).
So, we won't sell your stuff, but we'll be so tightly integrated with these other sites that they'll know what you're doing anyway.
If the whole point is to avoid Facebook et al, WTF is the point of broadcasting to them everything you do?
Goodbye Ello.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Watching a TV show or movie with friends. In person. Fuck Facebook, Ello, or whatever ruse they're using this time.
And no matter what the charter is, if they are liquidated the court will sell all of your data to the highest bidder to pay off creditors.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
another social junk site. Just what we needed.
Keyword 3rd party. Yes you will get ads but they will be served by themselves or second party partners instead of 3rd. Trust no corporation, especially ones who play with words. That is IMO
Jack of all trades,master of none
I wonder if their promises would hold up in bankruptcy court if thing should come to that.
"user-specific" = "we are going to sell aggregated data"
"on behalf of a third party" = "we are going to get direct ad sales up and running soon"
#3 is just hysterical ... if they get acquired, they lose the right to any such thing as they become a wholly owned subsidiary, subject to whatever policies the parent company deems fit. As if it hasn't already happened about a billion times by startups who did one thing, then were bought up and summarily dismantled. Ello makes a false assumption that people give a damn about their product. An acquiring company may see it as a way to get a seasoned dev/qe team and shutter the service entirely. The examples of plucky startups that got pulled into the Apple/Google/Microsoft/$GINORMOUS_COMPANY orbit and summarily forgotten or dissolved is pretty big.
Ello is web-only right now. Android and iOS apps are promised in the future, and right now are the bottom of a future feature list.
There are social networks that thrived being mostly app-only (Vine, Instagram, Whatsapp)... But being web-only is a huge handicap right now.
Ello has a steep climb ahead of itself. They seem to have adopted the mobile app business model. You get most of the functionality for free but if you want the good stuff you'll have to spend a few bucks.
Personally, I'd be happy to give them a few dollars if I had an iron clad guarantee that none of my personal information is going to be shopped to the highest bidder.
But in the social network space it's all about scale. Massive scale like Facebook and Twitter have. It's going to be a tough sell to people that are used to getting the apps "for free". Its not really free of course -- you just pay FB and Twitter using a different currency (information rather than money). But of course, most people don't understand that. They think that FB is "free" because you don't have to give them any money.
Then along comes Ello asking you to pay. It's going to be a tough sell.
I can see the comparisons with Google+. It's out there and it's pretty good but nobody you know uses it so you don't use it either.
If you don't like it, you probably shouldn't be on it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'd respect the intent if "Sell user-specific data to a third party" was replaced by "Allow 3rd parties any access to your online transactions" since metadata correlations -> identity match.
Further, I expect identifying the class of people who move from the other social networks to Ello due to tracking concerns provides a very valuable dataset.
Not ironic, the job is to help transfer people tired of being used out of the those platforms, as many are all too ready to go.
I don't care what their corporate charter says. Personal data is valuable, and as such one cannot believe anyone who promises not to use it for their own gain.
The enterprise of social networking includes aggregation and transmission of personal data. That is how it works, and how it always will work. If you want to use such sites, be judicious about what you post. That's it. There is no, nor will there ever be, a social networking site that does not aggregate and monetize personal data, and any site that pretends to be so is both deceptive and doomed to fail.
If you want something to trust, trust this: people will always follow their incentives. You can know what social networking sites are doing with your data, and can count on it, if you know what their incentives are. Armed with that knowledge, you can then make wise choices about what data you give them. That is the reality that we must all face; it will never change.
Agreements/promises like this are completely unenforceable if/when a company goes bankrupt. ALL assets (including all personal info) WILL be sold.
1. Enable JavaScript (OK, everybody requires that, NBD) but then the real kicker 2. You have this mass of circles that heave and scroll as you move your pointer. Sea-sickness. OMG, you're supposed to click those circles? Why???
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
G+ has more visits than Twitter or LinkedIn:
http://www.experian.com/marketing-services/online-trends-social-media.html
It would be nice if the company was run from a country that didn't throw its constitution out the window when it becomes inconvenient.
I think the idea of an ad-free site is fine. Whatever. I hope you're able to pull that off and look forward to watching your progress.
But calling it the anti-Facebook sounds really silly. The WWW is the anti-Facebook social network. (Usenet sort of was, too.) Actually, I take that back: email is probably the ultimate anti-Facebook social network. It's just that email is so anti-Facebook, that you (well, most of us -- hi there, government!) can't see it "from above" so third parties (e.g. companies like Facebook) don't get to categorize things. (Now that I think of it, Google's brilliance once again starts to shine through. Perhaps Gmail (not Google+, but Gmail) is the perfect sweet spot between Facebook and anti-Facebook on the spectrum of social networking technologies.)
Any centralized site could never possibly be the anti- Facebook because it's going to necessarily have most of the same social disadvantages and distortions (relative to real-life social ties) that Facebook has. There's a sameness and lack of actual disagreement on any interesting issues.
(This is not a Godwin!) For some site to say they're the anti-Facebook, is like saying Stalin was the anti-Hitler. Or that Chevy is the anti-Ford, or Coke is the anti-Pepsi.
Now, a protocol could possibly be the anti-Facebook. But we already have the web, so I don't know why anyone would want to work on that. The web is awesome.
A slashvertisement!
Why is the front page full of pictures of just hipsters?
Too many nested parens, didn't read. Are you off your ADHD meds?
Try being more coherent when you attempt to communicate.
Why is it that we have to have social networking based on a web site. Why not P2P software with a PKI web of trust. When you friend someone, the under-the-hood action would be signing their public key.
>> Ello's choice of a mono sans-serif font is significant for indicating that their message is a simple but powerful one
Or, that they all play a lot of Dwarf Fortress.
So it's a troll/pedophile/porn facebook type of place?
I don't see how anyone can believe this:
Ello uses an anonymized version of Google Analytics to gather and aggregate general information about user behavior. Google may use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the site, compiling reports on site activity for us and providing other services relating to site activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. To the best of our knowledge, the information gathered by Google on Ello’s behalf is collected in such a way that neither Ello, nor Google, can easily trace saved information back to any individual user.
>> The news here is that you're willing to spend an entire day touching PHP for only $100
Funniest thing I read all day.
They didn't specifically say "companies" are included so they can make all the money they want off business accounts.
Also, I think it's reasonable to call the main site the platform like Android and then make money off freemium game and app sales, also like Android or the Apple Store. That's definitely enough money right there.
I'd like to know who invested in a company that has no way of making money. I'd like to sell them a bridge.
What happens if they don't follow the rules? Will they serve prison time?
It's not just selling your data to third parties, it's collecting the data in the FIRST place that alienates many users. Many people, for example, don't realize that Facebook is tracking them all over the web, or that their smartphone Facebook app is tracking their exact location 24/7. You can download apps that show you where your Facebook friends are at that particular moment on a Google map. Wow, old Fred's in that topless joint again. Why is she in Bill's house at 2 a.m.? Why do I get ads for Home Depot when I'm driving past Home Depot? I'm really trying not to make a passe' joke about "Big Brother." And many people don't realize that signing in with Facebook, or just having those little like/share icons on a web page, enables Facebook to run scripts that can track everything you do on that page. OK, so they say they "don't sell your data to third parties." Big deal. That doesn't cover the bases, not even close.
I would have thought this would be the elephant in the room, but maybe I'm the only one missing it:
Company takes in a five million dollar funding round.
Company promises to never make a profit.
How are they going to pay back the funding?
What exactly is the company that paid the money "investing" in if the recipient company never plans to get money from their "customers"?
Finally.
I imagine the intent is to make people who currently use the other social media sites comfortable with migrating to Ello. This way a user could start using it even though none of their friends are on it yet.
If Ello catches on and becomes popular, then users could stop doing the auto-push to other networks.
I haven't looked at their site, but hopefully they allow easily toggling that option. And hopefully they make signing up easy without tying it to your existing accounts.
Doesn't anyone notice the last clause is a viral clause? Cmon this is a tech site
Perhaps they'll hire a couple of actual UX and UI designer now.
Is a formal promise more legally binding than a non-formal promise? It sounds good in principle, but is it really legally binding in any sense?
All corporations are bound by their bylaws and articles of incorporation, and are subject to shareholder suits if they deviate from them. In that sense, it is a binding promise, though it is binding to the shareholders, not customers. Customers generally will not have standing to challenge corporate decisions in court, except in cases of criminal behavior, negligence, or other torts where the customer can prove a direct, material harm.
Is it transferable and binding to someone who subsequently buys Ello?
Under California law [1] at least, public benefit status is not binding on a subsequent purchaser of the corporation. However, the shareholders must approve any purchase, and if the corporation then converts to a standard business entity, the corporation can be forced to buy out the dissenting shares at fair market value.
A public benefit corporation can also be converted back to a standard corporation by amending its articles of incorporation, subject to shareholder approval. [2] I don't know where Ello incorporated, and I haven't looked at other states, but the law is likely similar across states that have public benefit corporations.
[1] Cal. Corp. Code 14604(d)
[2] Cal. Corp. Code 14604(a)