Paul Budnitz is an author, artist, and entrepreneur who, until recently, was best known as the founder of Kidrobot, a retailer of high-end “art toys” for kids and grown-ups. About a year and a half ago, Budnitz was telling some friends who run a design firm in Boulder, Colorado, how terrible he felt social-networking Web sites had become—all the ads, all the tracking of personal information. “Let’s just make our own, and we’ll invite our friends to it,” he recalls telling them. “They were like, ‘That’d be a lot of work,’ and I said, ‘Come on.’ ”
They recruited some programmer buddies to build the site, and for almost a year they limited its users to several dozen of their friends. But people kept hearing about it and asking to join. Finally, Budnitz and his friends raised some funds from investors and built a version of the site that would be open to the public. In August, they started accepting users to an early version of the site, known as Ello. They published, on the front page, what they described, in the grandiose tone typical of Web startups, as a manifesto. “Your social network is owned by advertisers,” it began. (Facebook and its peers make money by selling ads and user data.) Ello promised to be different. It would make money by selling access to special features—like changing the background color of your profile—for a fee of a dollar or two.
For a while, Ello grew at a respectable, manageable pace. People in Boston’s techno-goth scene got into it, Budnitz noticed, as did people in privacy-oriented Europe who had read stories about Ello in the local press. But recently Ello has benefited unexpectedly from a social-networking controversy. In early September, some prominent drag performers in San Francisco received messages from Facebook informing them that their accounts—which were registered under the names of their alter egos—had been suspended because they weren’t using “real” names.
The performers felt that their stage names represented an important part of their identities. Some also worried that the requirement to use real legal names would expose them—as it would others from vulnerable groups—to being outed, bullied, or worse. They protested loudly—online, at first, and then in a meeting with company representatives. Nevertheless, Facebook declined to change a longstanding policy requiring real names—which it defines, in its Help Center, as the name that “would be listed on your credit card, driver’s license or student ID.” (A Facebook spokesman told me by e-mail: “Having people use their real names on Facebook makes them more accountable, and also helps us root out accounts created for malicious purposes, like harassment, fraud, impersonation and hate speech. While real names help keep Facebook safe, we also recognize that a person’s real identity is not necessarily the name that appears on their legal documentation, and that is why we accept other forms of identification that verifies the name a person uses in everyday life.”)
The performers, and others who agreed with them, started planning another protest. Some accepted Facebook’s terms for the time being; Lil Miss Hot Mess (who asked that I not publish her legal name) told me that she got her account reinstated by agreeing to use part of her legal name—a first and middle name. But about a week ago word started circulating—on Facebook, mostly—of a social-networking site that didn’t require real names: Ello. Lil Miss Hot Mess told me that people were talking about it both as an alternative to Facebook and as a form of protest. She signed up for Ello this week.
Budnitz declined to reveal how many users Ello has, citing its privacy-oriented, less-data-obsessed ethos. But he did tell me that, around the time when word of Ello began spreading among Lil Miss Hot Mess and her friends, inquiries from people who wanted to sign up started rising exponentially. Then a few media outlets caught on. By Thursday morning, Ello was getting thirty-five thousand requests an hour from people who sought invitations to join. (The site is still invite only.) Budnitz said that Ello’s single customer-service employee used to know that she was getting her job done when she finished the day with an empty e-mail inbox. “That became impossible about ten days ago,” he said.
The designer toys that Budnitz has created at Kidrobot are hybrids of art and product; he described Ello as having a similar mission. When we talked, he focussed mostly on the design of the site, and I asked him whether he thought of Ello as a business at all. The answer was an emphatic but qualified “yes.” Budnitz said that he wants Ello to be sustainable, but that he sees no need for it to “become a billion-dollar company.” Because it’s relatively inexpensive to keep the basic infrastructure of a Web site running, he feels confident that he and his co-owners—the designers and programmers who helped build the site—can turn a decent profit by selling extra features for a dollar or two apiece. Sales of these features have not yet begun, and it remains to be seen how the site will prove viable as its engineering expenses and support burden mount.
While Budnitz seemed enthused when we spoke, he also came across as a little frantic; he and his co-owners were barely keeping up. When I followed up with his assistant to seek an invitation to the site, my e-mails went unanswered until the next day. In the meantime, a friend invited me. I was greeted by a pleasantly white screen and a message: “Welcome to Ello, a simple, beautiful & ad-free social network.”
From there, things became confusing. The search function didn’t seem to work (to track down my friends, I went back to Facebook, where people had posted screen names that could be typed into the address bar of a browser—ello.co/[screen name]—to find their profiles). When I tried to post something, by typing and pressing “Enter,” like I would on Facebook, nothing happened. It turned out that I had to click a little gray arrow to post. I wasn’t the only one having trouble figuring Ello out; Josh Constine, a blogger at TechCrunch, tweeted, “Dear #Ello, without search or any find friends feature, I can’t follow anyone, so there’s no reason to come back. Fix this first or die.”
Even Lil Miss Hot Mess, whose experience with Facebook helped trigger the Ello exodus, seemed a bit unimpressed with some aspects of the site. “I think it sort of shows that people are looking for an alternative, even if it’s not the same feature-rich alternative,” she told me.
As it turns out, one of the biggest concerns people have voiced about Ello is that it lacks robust privacy features—or, really, any privacy features at all. Facebook won’t let a user “friend” another without the latter person’s explicit acceptance of a friend request; it also lets people decide, on a post-by-post basis, which of their friends see which material. (Though, of course, Facebook put many of its privacy features in place only after its users complained.) The absence of such features on Ello has made some of its early users feel a bit cheated. Tiara Shafiq, a performance artist whose stage name is Creatrix Tiara, joined Ello partly because it didn’t have a “real name” requirement, but she grew annoyed, as she wrote in a blog post, by its privacy issues. “The reason I got so worked up about it is that Ello makes such a big deal of privacy,” she said.
Budnitz acknowledged the site’s dearth of privacy options. He said that adding them has been on Ello’s to-do list since before people raised the issue, and has become a priority in light of the complaints. Still, he couldn’t be sure how long it would take to install the features. Shafiq, Lil Miss Hot Mess, and other Ello users told me that they hope the site improves with time; every one of them said that, in the meantime, they’re still using Facebook. It works better for the time being—and, besides, it’s where all their friends are.
