Mediaboss Marketing

Is anonymous social networking a flash-in-the-pan trend? A winner-take-all category? Which of the anonymous social networking apps around today are still thriving, and which are practically dead?

These questions come to mind today as one of the leading companiesin the anonymous social category, Secret, revamped its application, borrowing ideas from popular apps like Yik Yak and Snapchat and others in order to introduce new features like location-based posts and disappearing private messages.

Secrets pivot is representative of the apps inability to maintain growth amid an overall decline inanonymous social networking applications, with the exceptions of Yik Yak, Whisper and, more recently, newcomer After School.

For a bit of background before diving in: Oneof the biggertrends amongconsumer applications in 2014 was the rise of anonymous social networking or apps that allowedusers to post publicly to networks without using their real names. Users on these apps sharesecrets, gossip andotherrandom thoughts.

They are different from private messaging apps because their content is visible to anyone who logs in, or anyone in a given geographical region. That is, theyre one-to-many sharing apps, not one-to-one mobile messengers.

Investorsand the media alike debated about the ethics of these sorts of apps, as they often allow for cyberbullying and shaming of public figures andin some cases, even seemed toencourage that activity.

Nevertheless, anonymous social seemed to be carving out a new category for itself this year.

It almost made sense that this sort of activity would emerge in apost-Snowden society where users realized thatsocial networking on more public, real-name networks like Facebook had been tracked by their own government.

Perhaps anonymous social would encourage the same sort of human connection that Facebook once offered, without the drawback of disclosing your true identity along the way?

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Few Winners In Anonymous Social Networking, And Secrets Not One Of Them