Mediaboss Marketing

Social-networking apps that eschew real names are gaining ground.

For just over a decade, Facebook has enforced the idea of an authentic online identity tied to each user of a social network. This might be fine for sharing news of a promotion or new baby with friends, but sometimes youd probably like to post a status update that wont go on your permanent record.

This urge might explain why millions of people, many of them under the age of 25, are flocking to a free smartphone app called Whisper, which lets you share thoughtsa few lines of text set against a background imagewithout adding your real name. Secret, a newer free app for the iPhone that shares posts anonymously through your existing social networks, is based on the same idea.

After years spent filling social networks like Facebook and Twitter with the minutiae of our lives, weve left permanent, heavily curated trails of personal data in our wakeover 1.2 billion of them on Facebook alone, judging by its user count. New apps allow us to continue being social without worrying about the repercussions of sharing the most personal confessions.

Facebook is more like the global social network; its like our communication layer to the world, says Anthony Rotolo, an assistant professor at Syracuse University, who studies social networks. Its no longer an outlet to share personal thoughts.

Whisper cofounder and CEO Michael Heyward believes his appand apps like the incredibly popular Snapchat, which lets you share self-destructing messages with friendsappeals because it taps into this increasing awareness of your digital footprint and the idea that everything you post online can be traced to you. He wont say exactly how many users Whisper has snagged since launching in 2012only that there are millions. But venture capital firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners have so far plowed $24 million into the startup, which is based in Santa Monica, California.

Users post whispers under a name of their choice, setting the text on top of an image taken with a phones camera or chosen from within the app. You can respond to others whispers with your own and privately send direct messages to other users. You can see the latest and most popular whispers, or search for a particular topic by keyword.

In the time I spent using it, I saw everything from Miss those days when my hardest decision was what Barbie to play with to 19 years old and Im about to start the process to adopt my baby brother.

Some Whispers were funny or silly, but many users do seem to use the app as a forum for raw honesty: there were plenty of posts like Im deployed to Afghanistan and nobody in my platoon knows Im bisexual. Im afraid it would ruin my ability to lead them and Im a dentist. People who disrespect my front desk staff are going to feel a little more pain than everybody else. While its impossible to tell whether posts are genuine, at least some people are presumably using the app to bare their souls.

Heyward says many people use the app to seek relationships and advice as well as to share secrets. I think people are really craving more authenticity and really want to feel more connected to people, he says.

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Some Mobile Apps Add Anonymity to Social Networking