

The State of Ello - Leynos
http://dembot.com/post/672

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jere
>What’s interesting to me of course is that even though they don’t have a
convenient API for all of the data, all of the data (except passwords they
said) is public. So if you and I can see it, Facebook, e.g. could easily see
it too, and tell what everyone is doing just the same.

If true, this sort of nullifies their claim not to sell your data. No one
needs to buy it; it's just sitting there!

~~~
Leynos
Let's be realistic here. The extent of that information is the users' profile,
which currently consists of a 160 character bio, a human readable name (which
can be anything) and any external links they choose to supply; their
followership information; and whatever they choose to include in their posts.

Is there really enough salable information in there to make it worth the full
time effort that would have to be put in working against the bot detection
measures, the inevitable IP blocks and account suspensions? Is that really
something you could base a business on?

I imagine the Ello social graph could be useful in an online anthropology
study, but I can't see anyone getting much mileage out of it beyond that.

(Although to contradict myself, CircleCount.com does maintain a database of
Ello user statistics. They did ask the Ello team nicely about this, and I
imagine there is some kind of exception made here.)

~~~
jere
If the data were worthless it would _also_ make the promise not to sell
pointless, paralleling my original point.

But I actually think there's plenty there, even if you just include the posts.
What turns out to be valuable can be surprising. I remember when "interests"
was a plain text input field on Facebook where people put a comma delimited
list. And I loved it; I even put little jokes in there (e.g. coffee,
chocolate, and mint, concurrent or consecutive). Then one day, they turned
every one of those list items in the text field into, essentially, a fucking
ad.

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whatsgood
from the article: "Most striking, the company said they are applying for
patents to protect what they believe are innovative ideas for providing social
network services." -i would love to see ello help establish a community
protocol using the open source governance model.

------
yaeger
> On numbers, they said they are not going to play the numbers game anymore
> (i.e. will not tell us)

So, that bad, huh?

~~~
Leynos
The number of registered users was sitting at around the 2 million mark at the
end of 2014. Since then, they've started issuing invites for people who asked
for them at a more rapid pace (one Ello developer said signups are now at a
rate of around 250,000 a week). Of course, there's no way to obtain an
indication of the number of active developers from this.

I'd speculate that the reason they held off issuing solicited invitations is
that they spent most of December 2014 performing infrastructure and backend
upgrades and improvements. (The fact that these upgrades happened is fact, the
connection with the change in invite policy is speculation).

