Have you been invited to Ello yet?

Still in beta form, the ad-free social network has been getting a lot of buzz this week, with a reported 4,000 people signing up per hour, according to a MarketWatch report.

Ello, a spare, black-and-white interface interface that allows users to be anonymous, comes at just the right time since Facebook recently began enforcing its policy to shut down accounts that don't use their real names.

"I don't know if it's going to ever be 'the next big thing,' but it is definitely in the right place at the right time," said Christopher-Ian Reichel, a user-experience executive in New York, as quoted by MarketWatch. "And Facebook is at a critical moment where entire segments of its audience are all looking to jump ship."

Launched in August, Ello is touted as the social network that will never clutter your feed with advertisements and won't track your personal data. It has been drawing artists and designers as well as members of the LGBTQ community who have clashed with Facebook's policy that requires real names.

Ello was born because "none of the social networks are fun anymore," said co-founder Paul Budnitz, according to Bloomberg News. The site is receiving more than 45,000 requests for invites per hour, Budnitz said.

While it promises never to target users with ads, Ello still relies on analytics to "understand how people are using Ello and how we can make the network better," according to the website's FAQ page. 

It's still unclear what this fresh take on url interactions will mean for the social media landscape. Ello could become another Twitter, growing into a social media icon while still not garnering anywhere close to Facebook's around 1.3 billion users. If the site sticks to its plan never to introduce ads, it's unlikely that Ello could be as large as Facebook, which needs revenue to cover the servers necessary to support such a huge user base.

Ello recently had a $435,000 funding round from a Vermont-based venture capital firm, but its creators say that any revenue will come from users paying for extra features in the future. 

"The vast majority of Ello's features, the ones that all of us use every day, are always going to be free, and we'll keep improving them," says the site. "When you choose to pay a small amount of money for a new feature, you help support Ello as an ad-free network and help us make it better and better."

Only time will tell if Ello will become another Google+, spinning mostly empty circles, or take on a life of its own as something new in the increasingly crowded world of social media.

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