When Facebook recently instituted a "real name policy" obliging members to use their legal name, as it would appear on a driver's licence, the intention was to clamp down on false accounts. What happened instead, says The Daily Telegraph, was a full-scale rebellion.
When drag queen 'Sister Roma' refused to change her name "to the rather more prosaicMichael Williams", Facebook kicked her out, prompting outraged members of the LGBT community to exit en masse.
The beneficiary was a bike-maker from the wilds of Vermont, who had recently gone live with a new social network called Ello, which made a virtue of its spare design and advertisement-free credentials.
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By the end of the September, Paul Budnitz's arty baby had gone viral as the new "anti-Facebook", and the small team in his bike shop, was fielding 45,000 applications to join every hour. As one of them told BusinessWeek, "right now, we're throwing the coolest party on the internet".
Budnitz is at pains to explain that slaying Facebook isn't actually the intention. "We really built it for ourselves first" as an antidote to the bombardment of advertisements, and growing privacy and data-tracking issues he'd come to hate on other social networks.
As a result, he maintains, "we don't consider Facebook to be a competitor. We consider them to be an advertising platform more than a social network."
Ello launched in 2013 as a private network restricted to around 100 people, with artists and writers predominating. It is still invitation-only, says BusinessWeek. "Invitations are selling on eBay for $100."
Despite the feeding frenzy, Ello is sticking to its original ideology. Its manifesto proclaims: "We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate." The idea is to build "a sustainable business" around that concept. Not everyone is convinced it's possible (see below).
The entry to Ello's office, a renovated warehouse in Burlington, Vermont, is painted with a Hunter S Thompson quote: "Wow! What a ride!" It sums up Budnitz's mentality, says Mashable. com. A serial entrepreneur, "he is a man whose wheels never stop turning".
Born in California, the son of a nuclear physicist, Budnitz, 47, "began coding software for nuclear power plants in his teens", before studying photography and film at Yale. Several ventures followed, culminating in two successful firms, each founded around 2002: Kidrobot, in which street artists make toys for adults; and Budnitz Bicycles, which he started "because he couldn't find the bike he wanted".
The firm's high-end titanium city bikes now sell for $8,000 a pop. "I'm more an entrepreneur and into new stuff than keeping things going," Budnitz told Inc magazine. Indeed, he is "blessed and cursed with the compulsion to keep starting new projects". How long will he stick at Ello? "As long as I'm useful."
A new phase for the social network?
A week after Ello began gaining attention as a potential "Facebook killer", the editor of Fortune asked Facebook's second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, what she thought of the new network, says Seth Fiegerman on Mashable.com.
"I haven't seen the site," she shrugged. According to Budnitz, that was pretty standard: people would "roll their eyes" at the very idea of a new social network. But sometimes, he says, "you need to take a risk" even if it means looking "pretty stupid".
These days Budnitz is being inundated with offers, says Lois Parshley in BusinessWeek. "I have every investor in the world in my inbox. Someone today offered to fly us out in a private jet to talk. We said we're just too busy."
That said, Ello has accepted some $435,000 from FreshTracks Capital, a venture firm focused on businesses in New England. Budnitz got some flak online for "accepting outsiders' money".
But he maintains his backer is a neighbourly business and "totally with the plan"of building a sustainable company on a "freemium" model the basic platform is free and features can be added for a smallfee, just as users buy apps for their phones. "We're not in it fora quick flip," says one FreshTracks partner.
Budnitz says he isn't aiming to become a $30bn firm; Ello isa forerunner of a more niche phase of social networking. Butmany doubt he'll be able "to resist the siren call of advertisingand data", says Katherine Rushton in The Daily Telegraph notleast because FreshTracks "is likely to want a serious return".
Budnitz argues that the beauty of his model is that "overheadsare relatively low we don't need to pay for advertising salesor data collection". The site's aesthetically ascetic appearancelends itself to lucrative customisation, he told Steven Tweedieon Business Insider, claiming to have had "thousands of emailsfrom users suggesting features for which they would be willingto pay". Time will tell if they do so.
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