Invited to join Ello, a new social network experiment

[chrisinhouston]

I've often thought that The Cellar was one of the original social network forums; from what I can tell I joined in 2001 and have around 1500 posts. Not a lot by what I can see of others posting here but that's still 13 years! And I like it here or I would have left. I feel like I know most of the long time members in a round about way and everyone is pretty civil or else they seem to disappear.

In 2007 I opened a Twitter account and added my daughter who lived in San Francisco at the time and we tweeted a bit. I still have the Twitter account and a few followers but rarely post there. I just don't see how it is relevant to me and my work but I follow a few folks and check in now and then on what they do.

In 2007 or 2008 I joined Facebook and immediately got befriended or whatever they call it by a bunch of people I went to high school with as well as some family members. I stuck with it for 3 years or so until I got so tired of all the posts by people I had nothing in common with. After Obama was elected I began to see that I seemed to have very little in common with the high school crowd, most of whom still lived in Georgia and were hard line conservatives bordering on bigots. I fell into the trap of responding which only caused people I didn't know to flame me. So one day I just closed my account and never went back.

Just before I quit FB there was talk about Google+ so I opened an account there. It seemed like G+ was much more geared towards photography and tech folks like myself and I quickly set up some circles (their way of organizing who you follow), one for photography, tech stuff, family, friends, etc. And over the past I posted a fair amount of my work from my travels and trivial pursuits and have had upwards of 6000 followers (almost was up to 10K but lost quite a few when I took a break from posting anything). Funny thing about G+ is that when it first got going everyone was sharing circles... Circles for landscape photography, portrait photography, B&W, etc. Now not so much but I seem to get a few new followers each day, mostly from far away places like India or the Middle East. Not sure how or why they want to follow me but it's kind of funny. I'm pretty choosy about who I follow and keep it limited to avoid too much traffic in my daily feed. I have learned a lot from other photographers though especially when it comes to photo tips and techniques and retouching images. I've also gotten some neat coupon codes for gear and software that others have shared.

My sister got a LinkedIn account and asked me to join so I could be part of her LinkedIn network which didn't make any sense to me because I was her brother.... why the heck did I need to be in her network. But I did and after a few months of getting mostly solicitations from head hunters for jobs I didn't want I left and never went back.

So now I have just signed up with Ello, the newest thing in social networking. You have to be invited to join which was kind of odd. I put in a request about 6 weeks ago and received my invite with a super secret code today. I heard that people are actually auctioning off codes and invites on ebay! Oh well. I guess it interested me because it is new, still in BETA version, ad free and seems to be geared towards artists and creative people. Not sure about it yet but willing to give it a try.

Funny thing is my wife still has a FB account and got friended by some of the high school folks that I did like so I still get to see what most of them are up to through her feed. She calls me into her office every now and then with "hey did you know so and so did this?" so I look and think, ok fine but I still think the whole FB experience is pretty boring and mainly geared towards making Mr. Zuckerberg or whatever his name is richer.