Tag Archives: Ello

FACEBOOK BUYS OUT ELLO FOR $10 Million

imageMenlo Park, California (The Adobo Chronicles) – No one messes with a drag queen, and no one messes with Mark Zuckerberg either.

Just hours after Facebook issued an apology to drag queens and performers for requiring them to use only their real names in setting up their accounts, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has closed a deal to buy out Ello for $10 Million.

Ello is the new, invite-only social networking site that was being touted as an ads-free alternative to Facebook without any restriction on the use of drag, pseudo or stage names. Many disgruntled Facebook account holders were migrating in droves to Ello in protest of the giant social netoworking site’s real names policy. Well, at least until Facebook apologized to the drag and performing communities.

Everyone is claiming victory. The drag queens are happy that they can now continue with or restore their pseudo names.  Facebook just got rid of a potential competitor. And the people behind Ello are $10 Million dollars richer.

All’s well that ends well.

ELLO GOES VIRAL, THE WRONG ELLO THAT IS

IMG_5501San Francisco, California (The Adobo Chronicles) – Everyone seems to be talking about Ello, the new, invite-only and ad-free social networking site that is making Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg really really nervous.

Ello was created by a group of seven well-known artists and programmers as a simple, beautiful, and ad-free place to share artwork and connect with friends from around the world.

In its ‘About’ page, the founders state: “We built Ello because virtually all the other social networks were cluttered, ugly, and full of ads. We began to feel manipulated by the networks themselves — many of our posts were never seen by our friends at all, because ads had taken priority.We came to realize that a social network that has ads is a social network created for advertisers, not for people. Every move we made was tracked and recorded, and every post we made was read and sold to other companies so they could show us more ads. It wasn’t fun any more.”

Although still in its beta (trial) stage, Ello has already gone viral.

Alas, it is the wrong Ello. As millions of excited netizens googled the new site, something else kept coming up: an obscure nutritional products company with the same name, based in Monroe, Michigan. Owners of the Ello Corporation couldn’t be any happier with their free advertising.IMG_5499

The founders of Ello, the social networking site, blamed the situation on Apple iOS 8’s autofill feature.  When people type Ello.co (which is the correct URL) for the site , autofill adds ‘m’ thinking that they are searching for Ello.com, which is the URL for the Michigan nutritional company.