Every few months, someone speculates about the death of Facebook. The most recent source of the speculation is TIME Magazine, which recently ran a short article introducing Ello, a new social media network, to the world.

In some ways, the comparison to Facebook is apt. For one thing, Ello bills itself as a social website that is “Simple, beautiful & ad-free.” Considering how much controversy Facebook has inspired in recent years, due to its tendency to track user movements and sell that information for targeted advertising purposes, the Ello manifesto is an attractive one.

Another similarity between Ello and Facebook is that Ello is starting out with exclusivity as one of its biggest selling points. When Facebook got its start in early 2004, it was only accessible to users with Harvard.edu email addresses. The site later expanded to other university campuses, but was, for a long time, a college-based social network. Eventually, the site opened up to high school students, then to everyone. However, there is no doubt that exclusivity helped Facebook become the cool “must-try” social network at a time when Myspace was still popular.

Ello plays the exclusivity card a bit differently, but the effect is the same. Instead of limiting users to those with college email addresses, Ello is only offering membership via invite. Those interested in joining the network can request an invite on the website, or wait for a friend to invite them. Some current Ello users are even selling their invites on eBay, for as much as $150. This is perhaps because the chances of getting an invite from the site creators are slim: supposedly, the Ello site gets between 4,000 and 30,000 invite requests per hour.

With those kinds of figures, there is no doubt that Ello has buzz and momentum on its side. The question, though, is whether or not it fills any kind of void on the social networking landscape. Google Plus started out with a similar invite-only structure, but has since been forgotten by most users. This is mostly because Google Plus was just an imitation of Facebook with a different interface and a few unique features.

Because Facebook users have spent so much time building up their friend lists, photo albums, profile history, and more, it will take more than a simple imitator to ever threaten the site and its massive user base. It is for this reason that most of the popular social networking platforms that have emerged over the past 10 years, from Twitter to Pinterest, have distinctly different uses than Facebook. Ello has exclusivity and privacy working in its favor, but does it serve a social purpose that Facebook does not?