'Secret' iPhone App Is Silicon Valley’s Newest Obsession

On the Internet, there are several kinds of communities. There are the ones where everybody goes by real identities — in theory, at least — such as Facebook. There are ones where you can choose to participate using either your real identity or a manufactured one, such as Twitter. And then there are communities where anonymity is kind of the whole point. Such as Secret, a new iPhone app which debuted just last week. At the moment, it seems, half of Silicon Valley is fixated on it — though it’s hard to say just who, since it’s a community with no names, profiles or photographs. The overarching purpose of Secret, say its creators, “is to not build only an app, but a platform that will bring more authenticity, self-awareness and empathy to the world.” People, in other words, are more likely to speak their mind in an electronic forum if their words can’t be traced back to them. That notion dates back decades, at least to the era of dial-up bulletin-board systems, where fictitious identities were common. Secret has a lot in common with Whisper, another app which lets you overlay confessions on images; Whisper, in turn, owes a debt to the PostSecret site, which has been around since 2005. The most notable twist about Secret is that it’s controlled anonymity. Many of the items you see come from your friends (as determined by the folks in your iPhone’s contact list) and friends of their friends. And while nobody goes under a name or a handle, preassigned iconic avatars let you keep track of who’s who in a comment thread — even if you don’t know anyone’s identity. Secret’s creators take various other measures to preserve anonymity: It doesn’t show secrets until you have at least three friends on the system, and then shows them in random order. Oddly enough, however, some users choose to de-anonymize themselves by signing their secrets or uploading images of themselves.