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Ello: A Struggling, Valiant Idea

Ello is a new social media site designed to solve many issues their creators find present in facebook. It’s a public benefit corporation; it’s created by professional artists and designers; and perhaps most different, it’s ad free. Though a seemingly valiant idea, Ello does not have nearly the reach that facebook has, and many in the public sphere are doubtful it ever will.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-morgenstern/ello-isnt-going-to-work-s_b_5879942.html

The article describes many of the downsides to Ello, as well as issues it will face in the future, such as a lack of a sizeable development community, huge information tracking, and spam filtering.

We can take this article as describing that the potential payoff of Ello is rather low. Clearly at this point, though it solves some issues with facebook, facebook continues to have a robust, adequate platform for the majority of the public. The lack of the quick spread of Ello means that, if we take our current payoff for facebook, and compare it to the current payoff for Ello, individuals should join Ello if at least q– (current payoff Facebook)/(current payoff of Ello + current payoff Facebook) — fraction of their friends uses Ello.

From the article, we can assume that since the current payoff of Facebook is so high compared to Ello, our value for q is close to 1. So a large percentage of an individuals friends would have to be using Ello for one to join.

We can also analyze this from a cluster perspective at Cornell Unversity. If there is a significant cluster of students at Cornell with density greater than (1-q), then Ello will not completely cascade through the university.

To increase the reach of Ello, the creators should work to solve the issues it’s currently experiencing, and make a better product. This will increase increase the payoff of using Ello and make it a more viable product for the public.

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