So, you remember Louise Mensch dontcha? The trendy Conservative MP who wrote racy books and then married the manager of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Remember her?
You don’t remember her?
At the time, I thought she was quite spunky and a breath of fresh air in politics. I especially liked the bit when some newspaper ran a story about her using various recreactional drugs when she was younger, and her stopping them dead by saying she was so high most of the time she can’t remember exactly which drugs she was on. Brilliant.
But you don’t remember her.
Ok, you must have heard of the social network, a rival to, well, Twitter, that she founded. Menshn.com it was. See what they did there? They used a name that sounded like her name.
You remember Menshn dontcha?
No?
Menshn started off as a refuge for hot political debate, getting away from the Twitter trolls. For a month or two it seemed to be working. Then it just became a forum for whinging about, well, Menshn. And then after a couple of years or so it disappeared.
So it was Menshn that I remembered when I heard about Ello.
You’ve heard of Ello aintcha?
No?
Ok, well Ello has been launched using the invites only model that I first recall being used by Google’s Gmail when it started 400 years ago. Anything that people can’t just sign-up to and they have to get an otherwise rare invite for, always creates a hubbub. It gets loads of publicity via social media from people desperate to not be left on the outside. And all this gets written up by the various hip and trendy tech websites, building an even hotter fever pitch from those on the outside.
So, Ello is trumpeting that unlike Facebork it will always be ad free and it will never sell your data to people on the dark side.
And after all the hype and fever to get in to Ello, what’s inside?
Nothing.
And why would there be? With Google+, Facebork, Tumblr, and Twitter already chugging away with the different kinds of communities inhabiting each, along with 99.9% of users not giving a toss about how their data is used or how many ads or sponsored posts and links they see, why would they move to yet another social network?
They won’t of course. The existing and well established social networks have got it covered.
But, hey, good luck to Ello, hope you liked this little Menshn.
See what I did there?
(Ello can be found here)
England's England 