Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

...As it turns out, Ello was founded by entrepreneur iconoclast Paul Budnitz, founder of online retailer Kidrobot and Budnitz Bicycles. Although Ello rolled out just this summer, and is open to new users on an invitation-only basis, the New York Observer's BetaBeat blog reported today that it was experiencing sign-up requests of about 31,000 an hour.

For the past couple of weeks, Facebook has gotten a lot of flack from members of the LGBT community whose pages have been shut down because some, particularly those in the transgender community, use invented or chosen names. Some do this to avoid persecution in their communities, others do it because they are artists and peformers who have reinvented themselves. (We're thinking Ru Paul's Drag Race here.)

Facebook says it insists on real names to prevent fraud and abuse and other types of bad behavior on the network. It's unclear, however, why drag queens and transgender people have been singled out in recent weeks. 

In contrast to Facebook, Ello is ad-free, and it has no real name policy. While its look is pretty minimal, Ello's blackened out smiley face logo is somehow reminiscent of the hacker group Anonymous, and it reads quite differently from the innocuous look of Facebook's interface.

Ello's manifesto also tries to burnish its non-mainstream cred. Here's what it says....