Ello

 Ello  is microblogging silo similar to Twitter or Tumblr for posting short status update notes and pictures. Ello offers threaded commenting and a minimalist "designy" feel to it with some unusual (but nice) UX animations & interface ideas. As of Sep. 2014 Ello is currently invite-only.

Features
Ello provides the following features as observed from others use thereof:


 * request-invitation &amp; login with a email address, user chosen username, password
 * indieweb equivalent: signin via RelMeAuth or IndieAuth
 * follow and unfollow
 * reader UI with an integrated UI to:
 * post a note in Markdown at a permalink with:
 * autolinking of URLs, @-names, in note/reply
 * embedding of photos via Markdown
 * comments-display
 * comment creation UI (but no permalinks for comments, nor do they show up on your own profile)
 * photo posts that show very large photos e.g. when zoomed out on a cinema display
 * profile page (equivalent of indieweb homepage) configuration including
 * header image
 * icon
 * name (as displayed next to posts)
 * website (does not support rel-me)
 * plain text bio (unknown size limit if any)

Profile Page
Scrolling down below the hero image shows your posts

Indieweb Support
inquired about adding microformats2 support or other indieweb technology like webmention. A developer responded that he was not personally familiar with them, but would give it a look. 

inquired about support on 2015-08-12  and the response was positive and indicated that it was "on the roadmap"

API
Ello has not announced an official API yet, but it appears there is one. Unofficial documentation: https://gist.github.com/conatus/cc665f917d5558c123bc

POSSE to Ello
There doesn't appear to be a way to automatically POSSE to Ello.

Jon Pincus
Jon Pincus has manually POSSE'd a reply from his site (running Known) to Ello:
 * original reply: http://stream.tapestrymaker.net/2014/cshirky-good-points-is-it-possible-to-provide-flow-when
 * manual POSSE comment - first comment on https://ello.co/cshirky/post/a99yZmd6ZPMwM5Yatk0rRQ
 * Ello lacks permalinks for comments
 * "reshare" POSSE tweet, automatically generated by Known: https://twitter.com/TapestryMaker/status/518446785413402624

If you initially create a status update on Known, you can add the ello link by clicking on *Reply to a site*. If instead you create a post (in which the headline will be used for the tweet) you'll need to edit your known post to include the link to ello. Here's an example; I put this HTML is at the top of the reply

  Replied to a post on ello.co 

Prominent Accounts
The following accounts are interesting for their content, commentary, or authorship:
 * https://ello.co/waxpancake - example of lots of text, fairly critical of Ello itself
 * https://ello.co/thomashawk - beautiful photos, shows off Ello's large photo display in photo posts, e.g. view on a zoomed out window on a cinema display

Design
The following praiseworthy design aspects of Ello are worth noting and further analysis / reverse engineering for indieweb designs.

Fairly Effective Use of Whitespace
Once past the landing page, Ello opts for a completely blank, white canvas upon which their users' content is placed. Individual posts are set off from other posts and page content only by effective use of whitespace, rather than background-colors, lines, or flashy ui.

Large Photo Display
View https://ello.co/thomashawk zoomed out on a cinema display and see how well the photos scale. Though they could perhaps even do better going full bleed with the images. Thomas blogged about this on his own site:
 * http://thomashawk.com/2015/07/ads-on-social-networks-suck-ello-co-san-francisco-ca.html

Plumbing
It appears that Ello is run on Heroku. This was discovered by accidentally opening [http://ello.co. http://ello.co.] (note the trailing period) and seeing a "Heroku: No such app" error message.

Funding

 * Ello Takes $5.5 Million in VC Money, Signs a Legally-Binding Charter to Never Sell Ads or Data

Unsustainable VC Funding
See criticism on this theme written up by Andy Baio on Ello itself:
 * https://ello.co/waxpancake/post/oy73kFfDdhOPh8Jv9z9pFA

Exit notes of Aral Balkan
 * https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/

Ugly Permalink URLs
See above ^^^ (ello.co/username/post/gibberish-line-noise-hex)


 * not sure this is really fair, there has been no criticism of twitter on this when it uses only numbers instead of numbers and letters. 11:57, 12 August 2015 (PDT)

Desktop centric
"Don't try using it on mobile, very desktop centric" -

No permalinks for comments
There's no way to link to a comment, e.g. Jon Pincus's first comment here https://ello.co/cshirky/post/a99yZmd6ZPMwM5Yatk0rRQ which he manually POSSE'd from his own site: http://stream.tapestrymaker.net/2014/cshirky-good-points-is-it-possible-to-provide-flow-when

No rel-me support
There's apparently no way to enter your own personal site into your profile and have ello link back to it with rel-me. 

No Official API

 * See API.

No Export
No way to export your content / data. 

"'backup tools will likely be a paid feature. Though right now, just add .json to your url and you get your post data' https://twitter.com/cacheflowe/status/525328915653722113"

Related thread:
 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8498893 "Facebook's statement: 'Trust us. We'll show you ads.' App.net's statement: 'Trust us. We'll charge you so you don't have to see ads.' Ello's statement: 'Trust us, we won't show you ads.' The statement we deserve is akin to email's promise: you don't have to trust us; competing providers keep the ecosystem honest."

Back/Forward Buttons
Ello seems to add extra things in the history and makes the browser navigation buttons act strangely, at least in Firefox.

Unreadable Font
Ugly monospaced-font, with small font-size makes it hard to read. Font declaration in Firefox reads "AtlasTypewriterRegular","Andale Mono","Consolas","Lucida Console","Menlo","Luxi Mono",monospace -- Kartik

Errors and Downtime
On 2014-10-03 I noticed the main Ello interface seemed to stop working. Clicking a note permalink or comments icon did nothing. When I tried to view the profile directly, this error message was displayed. The errors did not appear to persist for more than 30 seconds, though. —



Applied for patents

 * The State of Ello by Andrew Baron (domain expired, partially recoverable via Internet Archive)

Self-description
''Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers. We originally built Ello as a private social network. Over time, so many people wanted to join Ello that we built a public version of Ello for everyone to use.'' About