Paul Budnitz paces his bicycle shop in blue sneakers. The 47-year-old co-founder of Ello speaks into a headset to a reporter, one of many interviews since his new social network went viral in late September. “The way to think about Ello is there are absolutely no advertisements, no data mining,” he says. “And there never will be.” Todd Berger, a partner in Ello and one of its primary designers, listens as Budnitz ticks off his talking points, sinking into a tangerine couch. “S-‍-‍-’s crazy,” Berger says. “It’s been wild.”

The Ello office, in a renovated loft in Burlington, Vt., is filled with shiny bicycles and Apple (AAPL) products perched on standing desks. Upstairs, espresso makers purr with Counter Culture Coffee grinds, and bespectacled tech bros hunch over laptops. The entryway is painted with a quote from Hunter S. Thompson: “Wow! What a ride!”

Ello launched in beta mode on Aug. 7, and by the last week in September, the team was receiving 50,000 requests per hour to join. “Right now we’re throwing the coolest party on the Internet,” says Berger, swinging his leather boots up onto a stool shaped like a robotic rabbit. Ello’s been referred to as the anti-Facebook (FB); on the site’s About page it’s described as a “simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.”

Ello is invite-only—you have to either be asked to join by one of its existing members or send in a request. Lucian Föhr, another partner, explains this philosophy: “We don’t want every person in the world to be on it, so we don’t have to design for the lowest common denominator.” Invites are selling on EBay (EBAY) for $100.

If you do manage to wrangle one, you’re taken to a stripped-down white page where content is divided into Friends (the people you follow) and Noise (everyone else). As on Tumblr (YHOO), users can post pictures or text; video and audio capacity is coming soon. Unlike Facebook, Ello doesn’t require members to use their real names—Facebook angered some in the drag queen community when it implemented that policy in late September. (The dictum has since been amended to allow people to use stage names.) “We embrace the LGTBQ community,” Budnitz says, “including their adult-oriented content needs.” Ello allows porn but asks members to flag it as “not safe for work” as a courtesy.

All the featured profiles on Ello seem to be high-end designers or children’s book illustrators, and the popular feeds are filled with Pop Art references and quirky photographs of common objects in strange places. If Facebook is a massive state university filled with your loudest and most obnoxious friends, Ello is a small liberal arts college overrun with snobbish pseudointellectuals.

(Bloomberg Businessweek)