Overhear.us: Corporate Gossip 2.0
Nick Gonzalez
34 comments »
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably had your fair share of bad managers and misdirected corporate initiatives, leading to grumbling around the office. It’s hard to tell the person signing your check that they’re the problem and not all of us can garner the same press attention as Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter memo.
Y Combinator startup Overhear.us wants to change that by providing a company specific anonymous forum for employees to dish the straight dope on what they really think about those TPS reports. Overhear.us creates company specific forums based on their email’s domain name, and yes that means there can be a company forum where you can bitch about Gmail. You sign up by just entering your email address, which send you a verification link to assure you’re the addresses owner. This also means you can invite coworkers by just entering their addresses. Once verified, you can stay logged in via cookie, or sign up for an account user name and password to manage your activity for multiple corporate domains.
The message boards are dead simple. You’re allowed to post to and read the threaded message board corresponding to your domain. No user ids are stored with the messages, even for internal purposes. They hope the anonymity will make people more at home airing their real concerns and frustrations. Since anonymity can also lead to abuse, the boards are also community moderated. Users to vote comments and threads up and down the list, the idea being that the cream will rise to the top.
Overhear.us sees a business model hidden in all this muck raking. Aside from being a useful source for HR departments and management at large, they think management will also like to clear the air about misconceptions or react to criticism. By buying an account (price TBA), your corporate overlords won’t be able to moderate the board, but buy a privileged spot for their posts, moving them to the top and having them specially highlighted for easy reading.
Overhear.us is currently angel funded and a product of the same team that made a similar site for posting secrets called SocialMoth. There is an existing company in this space called Anonymous Employee.
Very cool idea, it just goes to show that the interwebs might just be the perfect conduit for corporate conversations. Now, if they find a way to turn manager uptake of information into an equation we might really have something.
Wow, i’ve been waiting for this. Sounds to me like it’s similar to what Guy Kawasaki is doing?!
Anyway, great job!
every time they get sued, it is going to make them 10x bigger.
Nick, I think it’s overhear.us - not OverHear.us;)
–Zaid
i bet it is all going to be people posting about sex.
ha, it could be tpsreports.com
there are tons of sites …including fu…company who provide message boards like this…how big this site can get…why is anyone funding these little mom-pop sites which do not need money to start!!!
If they are serious about this then they should pay up and get Overhear.com. Right now all they are doing is driving traffic to Overhear.com. The domain is not bad but the .us extension is way down the pecking order, shows that you’re not a serious player! .Com is king!
#8: Did you not get the play on words…? It’s Overheard Us (like let us be heard)…
I do agree though, people are stupid and will just go to overhearus.com or overhear.com, so they should buy those and redirect.
The site is already full of craph (xxxx) messages. Can somebody track the ip address and hence the person?
This is not a new idea but I think that the requirement of using your email address to verify you are an inside source is a great feature.
How will it deal with people in a years time who get fired or leave, who verified there email address when they were working there and decide to go on a flame spree?
I’m not so hot on the requiring email addresses. While I agree that there needs to be a surefire way of ensuring that someone actually works at the employer that they’re discussing, this seems like a surefire way to ensure that anyone who joins this website and wants to remain anonymous actually would not be able to remain anonymous if the employer and its IT department got serious and started tracking who received verification e-mails from this website. That seems to destroy the value proposition right there.
#12 great point!
robert + zaid:
It is a really good point, but would they go after the entire company if everyone recieved verification e-mails? seems that if everyone gets one, then no-one is trackable. just a thought.
What #12 said.
A load of people talk shit about their company and said company performs a scan of the validation emails entering the corporate Exchange server. 12 results found, 12 people in heavy meetings with HR dept and screwed promotional chances.
This site misses the fact that many people who work in corporate environments do so because they like the security. Why go mess that security up by participating in something like this?
Those who want to be bitchy, out-spoken and risk-taking are probably not going to be working as a cube rat.
Interesting. Could evolve into a company-centric social network…yay!
Pretty nifty concept. Could definetly be helpful to businesses in understanding how their employees feel.
Interesting. I agree with #12 though, there’s no real way to be anonymous from your employer, especially if you’re using an e-mail address that they provided and can access.
Also, “It’s hard to tell the person signing your check that their the problem…” should be: “It’s hard to tell the person signing your check that they’re the problem…” I often make the same mistake.
Wow, another worthless Y-Combinator company. It’s almost like Paul Graham is driven to fund companies that have no real value and are just little projects designed by geeks with no understanding of real needs. They throw together something on Ruby and clap gleefully as TechCrunch features them.
I wish TechCrunch would return to what made it successful - focusing on startups that add value and have a chance at success.
Paul Graham and Y-Combinator, I laud thee for your amazing ability to get press for totally worthless “products”. The revenue model is retarded - no company is going to “pay” and validate such a site.
1. Posting anonymous crap about your company may seem like a cool idea, but the whole reason anonymous things don’t take off is they have no credibility. One could easily flame. There is no reliability or authenticity here. Even the Vault message boards get minimal traction.
2. The business model is total crap too. Y-Combinator doesn’t seem to understand that only a small portion of their companies will get acquired by retarded larger firms (e.g. Conde Nast) and the rest need to generate cash. These cool little projects are totally worthless otherwise. I know Paul Graham hates MBAs, but MBAs do make money. Something Paul Graham seemingly can’t impart to the young college dropouts he likes to fund.
3. There are tons of sites that already do this. Why does this get featured? Is Y-Combinator featured because of its ability to churn out worthless Web 2.0 start-ups that help give TechCrunch more content when there’s nothing worth writing about?
Seriously Nick, you need to stop being so chummy with these guys and being in their pocket.
Jesus… super-simplified message board dedicated to corporate gossip! Read first two chapters of “Web Programming for Chimps” and you’re ready to start your own company! And some folks are still saying that Web 2.0 will not turn into Bubble 2.0.
Goes along nicely with brilliant Web 2.0 projects like Twitter. The basic idea is always the same:
“Let’s have a table, and we’ll write a SELECT statement and them convert result into HTML and put some scriptacilous effects… now… let’s do some brain storming: WHAT ARE WE GONNA STICK INTO THE TABLE???”
Twitter sticks “I am scarching my butt while counting pigeons on that tree”
Reddit sticks “I think this story is cool - here is the link”
What else? Any ideas? Investors are waiting!!!
Reminds me quite a bit of an idea (a much better idea, natch) I had a few weeks ago after reading something on scriptingnews. Tried to contact Dave a few times to bounce ideas but setting up your appleTV to pipe RSS feeds of congratulatory messages about your 10th anniversary to your HDTV is obviously pretty time consuming
Feel free to ping me about it…
The anonymity thing - aside from the IT department snooping and having pretty much no problem identifying the poster if they want to (presumably you have to send your submissions via your validated corporate email address), people would have to tread very carefully about just what they posted, because airing some specific complaint about your boss may well identify you to him anyway. If the thing took off, it would probably invite all sorts of litigation and disciplinary proceedings, and if it remains something marginal then, well, who cares anyway?
is this a joke…?
the idea isnt new. it isnt useful. it isnt good either.
blackmailing companies so that they can have a dialog with disgruntled employees who are to chicken to actually raise their legitimate concerns therough legitimate channels will never work.
if someone has a constructive comment to make, i’d dare to say that 98% of companies and managers would like to hear it, good or bad.
this type of environment is ripe for everything anyone wants to say about any company, legitimate or not. mostly not.
this will fail before the term “web 2.0″ gets as tired and played out as my other favorite trend and term “ebusiness”.
LOL
I hate to say it, but I kind of agree with #19. Y Contributor is a great idea, but the start ups seem to be poorly thought out and from the “geeks” I’ve run into that they’ve worked with, I kind of agree that they don’t know the markets they’re playing into. Everything that spins out of it feels very kids summer camp to me, like a fun class project. Have they had any success stories?
I’m sure it *could* work in some of those really corporate culture focused, team meeting type companies, but why wouldn’t anybody just slap up an anonymous forum on their own?
I’m not sure if this is their messaging in the article (or the TC writer) but the heavy “share your corporate grumblings” angle speaks more to the employee, which doesn’t make sense since the employer is the one the solution targets. It’d be better to position it as a “tool for managers and executives to give employees a safe, anonymous platform to share ideas, gripes, etc.” for the benefit of the company.
If the app took more than a weekend to develop (allowing for a trip to the movies plus dinner and drinks on Saturday) I’d be surprised. The “privacy” statement is a joke.
It’s a nice idea - we’ve been doing exactly this (www.trenchmice.com) for the past 4 months. Come take a look at our site, and compare it to what they’ve built.
I can believe that before long their site will be full of anonymous dirt, but would the company actually 1. bother to respond? 2. reward them by getting a paid account?
If the issue raised is significant enough, it can easily be addressed via internal memo.
–
We Will Create Your Very Own Domain Name - http://PowerNamer.com
There is so much wrong with this! Anonymous? I strongly doubt that. This company isn’t going to last long in this form.
1. Each forum is based on your email address domain. You have to send them an email from the domain and await a reply back to get first access. That activity can be trapped and monitored by the company.
2. Are these forums HTTPS? If not and people are posting from their company computers, the company could trap all the post activity to the web site as it crosses their network. Remember reading about the secret Wal-Mart internal security group a few weeks ago?
3. No userid’s are stored? How about other info? IP address? Machine specific info? Every machine on a network is identifiable. Even if this info is stored separately, such info can be sued for.
4. Most people write in an identifiable pattern. They use the same words, phasing and make the same spelling mistakes. Company monitors could probably put 2+2 together and get 4 in many cases. The government agencies regularly do this.
5. If you say something threatening, slanderous or libelous, don’t doubt for a moment that a company will consider issuing a subpoena for overhear.us to reveal who the poster is. It has been done before.
6. No sane company is going to pay to join this fun fest. It’s just a waste of potentially productive time to get into a back and forth with “anonymous” posters. Why would they care? How many suck sites are there for major companies already? Do companies seem to care much about these sites? I don’t think so.