Mediaboss Marketing

The company is hoping that simplicity and privacy will win the day -- and more customers.

Ello, a new social networking site, is creating a lot of buzz and raising more than a few questions.

There's one thing, though, that industry analysts agree on: The hype that this new service is even close to being a "Facebook killer" is, especially at this early date, ridiculous.

"It's laughably nave to call Ello a 'Facebook killer' right now," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. "Sure, they're getting some media attention right now, but they're a far cry from even appearing on the social networking radar. The splash they're making in the media will drive user counts in the short term but it's going to be very hard to get users to defect to Ello from Facebook or even Google+."

Ello, a social site that launched in on Aug. 7 with just 90 users, has been called the anti-Facebook and the Facebook killer. The network, which is still available by invitation only, doesn't have nearly as many features as social rival Facebook or even Google+.

However, the site is getting as much, or even more, attention for what it doesn't do. Ello does not use advertising and it does not sell users' information to third parties.

And for people who worry about their privacy or simply are tired of seeing "suggested posts" or ads on their social news feeds for everything from dating services to weight-loss pills and anti-aging creams, Ello's promises can sound pretty inviting.

"Your social network is owned by advertisers," Ello executives write on their site. "Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that's bought and sold. We believe there is a better way."

In an email to Computerworld, an Ello spokeswoman said her company doesn't consider Facebook a direct rival.

"We don't really see ourselves competing with Facebook at all," she added. "We see Facebook as an advertising platform, not a social network. We thought Ello was going to be popular, but how popular it's become has surprised us. I think people are ready for a new kind of social network, untarnished by advertising, and that's simple and easy to use. "

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What you need to know about social-network upstart Ello

Facebook may have garnered 1.3 billion users since its inception a decade or so ago, but today there's an upstart contender that has set its sights on much of that same social networking world.

"Simple, beautiful and ad-free" is Ello's tagline, and the new social network is gaining considerable attention. Though it's still in invitation-only beta, it was reportedly gaining more than 30,000 new users per hour as of late last week.

"Your social network is owned by advertisers," reads Ello's manifesto. "Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that's bought and sold."

Aiming to offer an alternative, the site says it believes "that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership. We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate -- but a place to connect, create and celebrate life."

In fact, Ello doesn't consider networks like Facebook as competition "because they aren't really social networks," Ello spokesperson Rachel Fukaya told the E-Commerce Times. "They're advertising platforms."

Ello, on the other hand, "is a social network -- that's all we do," Fukaya said.

As for monetization, "Ello is still a business -- sort of like the app store, the main features of Ello will always be free," she explained.

To keep the site afloat, "for a very small amount of money we are going to sell special features that certain users may want to add to their account," Fukaya said. "We have thousands of people writing in requesting features they would be willing to pay for."

In the big picture, "we're proving that there's a different way to make money than selling ads, and can save the Internet from becoming one giant billboard," Ello's Fukaya concluded. "There's a better way, and we're building it."

Ello reportedly endured a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack early this week and lived to tell the tale.

Link:
Can Ello Convince Facebook Fans to Say Farewell?

San Francisco, Sep 30 (EFE).- Social networking giant Facebook has unveiled a new platform in which it provides its users' data to advertisers so that they can place their ads more effectively on third party sites.

The platform Atlas will gather data from Facebook and use it on external websites. This means that if a user clicks "Like" on the social networking site of sports shoes, ads of similar products may appear on other websites.

The data collected through Facebook is drawn from a history of the tastes and interests of each user, allowing advertisers to better identify their potential buyers.

Facebook, that bought Atlas from Microsoft last year for a sum of $100 million, finally launched it on Monday after a complete design overhaul.

Until now, Facebook was selling advertising space on the social network and using cookies to track the tastes of the users as they surfed the internet so that they could be shown ads according to their preferences.

This new method is designed, in principle, to improve the effectiveness of the advertising as cookies are often inaccurate and don't track well on mobile devices, something that Atlas will do through Facebook.

This new venture is Facebook's attempt to close the gap with its main competitor in online advertising, Google, which continues to lead by a wide margin.

In the second quarter, Google notched up earnings of $14.36 billion from advertising against Facebook's $2.68 billion, which is nearly five times less. EFE

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Facebook Sells User Data for Atlas Ads

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