Two week’s ago I had a good friend of mine come running up to me jumping around in an excited frenzy asking if I had heard about the “new Facebook” called Ello. I had recalled hearing the name a few times in conversation but I hadn’t really looked into it. This particular friend of mine was talking about how she was dying for an invite and was hoping that I could help her out – at that point in time I hadn’t really gotten into the community.

Her excitement on it really got me curious so I went home and looked into the rapidly growing platform and reached out to a few of my colleagues who are my go-to’s on digital trends. Out of a few quick conversations I ended up getting an invite so I could 1) secure my username and 2)  really get a feel for what this new platform is.

It really is an interesting design and community. Putting aside its no-advertising and privacy perks, its simplicity is refreshing. On most websites you’re bombarded with colour, styling, mass amounts of text and different pieces trying to fight for your attention all around the screen. With Ello’s intuitive layout and design your attention span gets a blissful rest where you can simply browse content that you want to see.

One piece I find especially entrancing is that you can follow people as ‘friends’ or ‘noise’ but they will never know which section you categorized them into – again further allowing you to customize the content that you want to see.

In it’s beta stage there are not as many people on the platform (at least within the social circles I interact with) so my feed isn’t very exciting. However,  I am really interested to see how it grows. The focus of the content right now seems to be more art and graphics. I wonder if when it opens up to the mainstream public that people will use it as a platform to share their personal thoughts and stories as they do on other social media sites. On the other hand it may continue to be primarily used by people who who want to share (or, as in my case, browse) less quantity, but high quality interactive content.

Personally, I love the unique look and feel of the platform and I really hope it does not turn into the “next Facebook” with mass amounts of personal information (that many of your followers could probably care less about). Keep with the simplicity and foster a place for people to share and interact with the interesting and cool things you do or create.

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