When I first started on Twitter ( nearly 8 years ago), people poked fun at it for being a little navel gazing. Most of the folks tweet
ing were IT geeks, commenting on Twitter itself. That eventually changed, but it was true of most new online experiments that the early adopters werethe geeks grooving on the tech itself.
Back then, a lot of artists had a love/hate relationship with the net. Artists were blogging, creating websites, hanging on LJ but also cursing the tech. Bandwidth was still not great and the dreams they had to share were a challenge to produce on the web. There were of course, many great websites pushing design and interaction boundaries but there were also lots of “still” galleries.
When G+ launched, there was an early influx of artists, especially photographers. To this day, some of the most vibrant virtual communities of photographers exists on G+. When I get the cycles( not often enough) I lurk and dream and become inspired. By this point artists had become active all over the net and social media and while there were a lot of IT geeks who were early adopters, there were also lots of creative folks ( artists, scientists, poets and storytellers) who flocked to a new tech looking for ways to connect, share their creations and become inspired.
And now, there is ello.
Ello is still in Beta. so I am not going to comment on bugs or missing features or
anything else tech related. Let’s give that 6 more months, But what I am revelling in is the fact that so many of the early adopters are artists. Not just photographers, whose digital works are reasonably easy to share on the net, but sculptors,painters, writers, journalists, filmographers, furniture makers, and workers in all media sharing their dreams and creations. Yes, it is buggy and sometimes awkward, give them a chance to build out an app. I will continue to hang out there, enjoying the creative buzz.
If you check it out, I am @roguepuppet there, stop by and say ‘ello.
