Disruptive Conversations

As people who follow me on Ello know, I've been experimenting a good bit with the platform. In order to capture some thoughts for own recollection (and also for the FIR report I need to record this morning), here are some quick thoughts and links about Ello that reflect what I've learned over the past few weeks.

First, as I wrote, we have to remember that Ello is not Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., and we have to just go in with an open mind.

The Ello platform is very definitely still a "beta" with a long list of features that they want to add, but over the past bit there have been some changes of interest:

• The Ello team has now release "muting" and "blocking" so that you can control a bit more of the experience you have on Ello.
  • Kevin Marks had some good commentary about how this issue is hard - and how it is also important to the IndieWeb and other activities.
• Cmd+Return on my Mac (Ctrl+Enter on a PC) has now become my favorite keystroke because it lets me rapidly submit comments or posts without using the mouse.
• You can press "f" and "n" to toggle between your "friends" and "noise" lists.
• There are several other quick keys that let you shift between different views.
• The mobile interface works well once you understand that you can swipe left and right to do more.
• Writing with markdown and emoji is fun!

I love the display of photos in Ello, but there's one bit of brokenness that does bother me:

• There are issues posting "portrait" photos from a smartphone, although there is a workaround to make them square first.

I asked the question of why should Ello have to have a mobile app and wondered about how Ello behaved different from other apps... and I learned a bit more about why (and what you can do)

Clay Shirky had two great posts about Ello being a conversational versus annotative medium:

• Part One
• Part Two

He also had two other good articles and threads:

• How he does NOT want a 'reshare' link and why Ello to him is more like LiveJournal and USENET
• How challenging it is to find comments you have left on Ello

Oh, and there's now a parody social network... Owdy! :-)

Please do join me on Ello if you are interested in the continuing experiments... and please feel free to share your own tips and insights!

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