I believe we live in a world of marketing and it took all the silly analogies I was taught in sales training for me to realise that it affects my life in so many ways, literally our sales pitches were likened to the act of getting anything you want be it a job, learning to drive or impressing a date it all came down to a very similar structure. Ello claims to be the first advertising-free social networking site that will not sell user information. It is also temporarily only allowing people to join via invite from a current user, the alternative being something that seems a lot like a waiting list. Of course this appealed to me, unlike Facebook and so many things in life it claims it’s not making profit from its users! Like waxpancake, the author of the article Adrian Miles posted, I too question how long the site will remain ad free and how much it can prosper with this structure.
I definitely think it’s very clever to market itself this way and I too fell for the hard-to-get, invite-only ploy and immediately logged onto my other social media accounts in search of a fellow user who could invite me with no results… Until the next day, a friend had seen my post and sent me an invite and a link to get started.

  This also had me thinking of how new networks are formed and Barabasi’s emphasis on those external connections that join us to new clusters and how important this one friend was to my participation in this network. Also about the ties I abandoned along with Myspace, most friends migrated to Facebook but the odd friend of a friend and band whose activity was something I was aware of at one point…