Mediaboss Marketing

As you settle into the social network (or wait for your invitation), learn about Ello's ad-free promise and find out how to navigate the interface.

Screenshot by Sharon Profis/CNET

By now, you've probably heard of Ello, the invite-only social network garnering attention for its radical approach to social networking. Find out why the site is seeing 35,000 hourly sign-ups, and why people are so willing to join yet another social network.

Ello is the anti-Facebook, and it has no problem stating that. The bare-bones, ad-free, so-minimalist-it-hurts social network was designed in response to the many controversial Facebook policies, especially the one that forces users to display their real names.

But when you look at Ello, it might not seem that much different than other social networks. It doesn't go out of its way to use innovative approaches to organizing your friends, discovering content, or enriching your experience. Google+, for instance, introduced Circles, confusing users before they even had a chance to set up their profile.

What you get is a hybrid between Tumblr and Twitter. Like Tumblr, you can post photos and written thoughts, long or short. Like Twitter, you can @mention people, and those mentions show up on your profile, as well as theirs.

Unadorned and intentionally sparse, the users and their content are the focus, while other site elements generally go unnoticed.

Ello promises to uphold its proposition and remain ad-free forever. The reason goes back to Ello's philosophy -- the only way to sell ads is by harvesting user data, and the company does not intend on doing that. In fact, Ello allows users to opt out of Google Analytics tracking, and details the ways in which it anonymizes user data.

Plenty of folks are dubious, but Ello responded to the skepticism by asserting its plans to find other streams of income. In a post, its founders stated plans to offer paid feature upgrades, which could be things like data exporting or profile enhancements.

Nope. We looked high and low, but there's no button to be found.

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10 things to know about Ello, the ad-free social network