Social Networks Demo

At one point, 35,000 people were signing up every hour.

I feel the urge to give up on Facebook, too, but it is hard to see how Ello presents the solution.

Social networks are inertia-led – the more effort you put into establishing one, the more rewarding an experience it is. Facebook has spent billions upon billions of dollars to make itself as user-friendly as possible. It’s hard to see how a new site can catch up, even with the best ethical intentions.

I have no idea what these features might be – a mobile app and an API would be good places to start – but the gist is clear: to get the optimal Ello experience you had better pay up, but only once, and you’ll have it forever. This is a terrible idea.

Here’s the thing though: the reason Facebook can pull that off is because companies like Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and Bluekai – all Facebook partners since 2013 – have been tracking what I do and buy for years. Privacy died a long time ago; pretending like Facebook killed it is naive (just ask Richard Stallman). If you truly care about privacy then don’t use the Internet, credit cards, a mobile phone, the list goes on-and-on.

If, on the other hand, you care about making a successful social network that users will find useful over the long run, then actually build something that is as good as you can possibly make it and incentivize yourself to earn and keep as many users as possible.

Ello revealed on Thursday that it raised $5.5 million in a Series A funding round. The company also announced that it has become a legal public benefit corporation, or PBC.

Ello raised $435,000 in seed funding from Vermont-based FreshTracks Capital in March. Its new Series A round is led by FreshTracks and two Boulder-based groups: Bullet Time Ventures (an investor in Jukely, a live event recommendation service) and Foundry Group (which invested in fitness tracking firm FitBit and crowdfunded apparel retailer Betabrand).

It’s worth noting that a number of brands, such as Netflix and Sonos, have created Ello pages. As digital strategist Ben Breier writes, branded content is a form of advertising.

In Yahoo's first quarter earnings report, there once again was no mention of revenue from Tumblr.

The obvious issue is the lack of advertising revenue.

the site's ad sales team has focused instead on encouraging clients to create their own Tumblr blogs and share content in the form of native advertising. Problem is, these ads don't make Tumblr much money.

Why would an entrepreneur want to spend four years as a middle manager at a shrinking dinosaur that just paid him $250 million?

on August 9, Yahoo offered Tumblr founder, David Karp $81 million more to stay at the company for four years

Some have speculated that Yahoo's share price rise reflects the growing value of its stake in Alibaba.

That includes new “Promoted Pins” from large national brands, but now it will also include paid placement for small and medium-sized businesses as well, with a new self-serve product it’s announcing today.

Pinterest’s new Promoted Pins product will enable its partners to only pay the company if users actually click through and view the content they’re promoting. In that way, Pinterest’s those ads aren’t that different from conversion-based links that might appear alongside Google’s search results, or performance-based display ads sold on a cost-per-click basis.

Pinterest still needs to figure out the optimal mix of Promoted Pins to content shared by other Pinners in a user’s feed.

allow the users to set a price (most were free) they want for the content they create — text, photo, video, audio, and live broadcasts.

within four months, the Pheed app had moved to No. 1 on Apple AAPL +0.13% social apps ahead of both Facebook and Twitter TWTR +2.76% for teen users

Mobli isn’t looking to simply gain Pheed’s 5 million users.

in just a few months, Ello has grown from a tiny online hangout for about 90 artist friends into a backlash-worthy viral phenomenon

but more than one million people have lined up to join the invite-only “beta” version

help from a Denver consultancy, Mode Set,

Why Viber? Simply, Viber is the messaging app with the greatest scale that is most open to being bought.

Kakao Talk: 150 million users,

Viber: still in its early days of making money, claims 280 million registered users and has raised no external money (that’s a big potential pay day)

rolled out Path’s first real revenue-generating feature with a shop for premium emoji-like “stickers.”

in the first 24 hours after the 3.0 launch, Path made more money than it had in its entire lifetime as a company, total (starting with its 2.0 version, Path has collected affiliate revenue from media sales generated in the app.)

universally lauded as beautifully designed and thoughtful, but has been criticized for possibly not quite making a big enough dent outside of the early adopter crowd.