One of the up and coming new Facebook Applications is Honesty Box. When you install it, you can send an anonymous message to any of your facebook friends. Only that friend sees the message, along with whether the sender is male of female. The creators say that they will soon add the ability for people to respond to messages. In the user reviews, some people have asked for the ability to have messages appear to everyone on their profile. I suspect they’ll add that as an option in the future, too.
But for now, if you’re dying to tell someone that you have a crush on them, or perhaps complain about their body odor, Honesty Box may be just the application you were looking for.
Another feature to add is to send anonymous that are NOT friends, that would be interesting.
The funny thing is with these “anonymous” apps is that you can see which applications your friend has added, and in order to write in someone’s honesty box you have to add the app. So unless a substantial portion of your friends have the app it’s pretty easy to tell who it is via process of elimination.
If it spreads to more profiles it’ll be great.
Great application. I’ve found that people love anonymous (or rather MORE anonymous chat).
One of my pet projects is http://www.Interactive8Ball.com, where 8ball questions are routed anonymously to other users who answer your questions. As we know from many an anonymous blog comment, people love giving their opinion when it can’t be traced back o them. Similarly, people seem to enjoy getting opinions from random strangers as well.
I see a potential problem with this app:
If a person is verbally threatened with this tool from a “friend”, will there by recourse in tracking down and unearthing the person ID ? I suppose the app is restricted to only friends, which makes this less likely, but this could be easily hacked, allowing any FB member to send anonymous messages to say … an ex-girlfriend, for example. Witness the emergence of “Stalk-book”.
The app will hopefully result in a preference denying anonymous messages … which would be a happy medium. Let the romantics whisper sweet nothings to each other while protecting those who wish to be left alone by those too cowardly or shy to connect with them directly.
The biggest problem with the Facebook platform is the spam you get from friends asking you to add a particular app. My application requests are building up at a rate of knots; there must be a better way to handle this?
Andre & Phil,
Just to clear up something about the app - anyone who can access the users profile can post something in their honesty box. So it opens up the possible contributors to anyone in your larger network. So you can have people who are NOT friends post.
Erik
great application, this exemplifies everything great about web 2.0 business. I anticipate a $50m buyout from google within 3 months, I’m sure they want to expand into this space.
heh the honest app /
honestly is too small fo niche` for TC to cover!
We are developing a few Facebook applications for a few bay area sites. The FB platform has a few major bugs they need to work out, but overall it has turned out to be a great social foundation.
Male OF Female eh?
I can’t believe I was the first to catch this.
There does seem to be some issues with this. Like mentioned, both parties have to have the app installed. So even with only a couple hundred friends you can probably narrow it down especially based on male or female.
Just doesn’t quite seem that anonymous…
Actually, anyone who can see your profile can make a comment in your Honesty box, whether they have the app. installed or not… so it can be real hard trying to figure it out, cuz it might not even be one of your friend, as long as they can see your profile by being in your network.
It seems that I have ran into a unique issue…somebody left an anonymous message but their statement was not color coded at all.
that just means the person has not listed whether they or male or female on FB.
about what Panama Jack said… i’ve actually been threatened recently through it. it’s a real panzy move i know… i’ve got it narrowed down to three people itcould be and i really would like to block my profile to them… but i don’t know exactly who it is. if there were an option of blocking this person or something it would be really great.
you CAN write in a person honesty box w/o being friends with them.
To Anonymous Joe, you can block the person. Under their comment it should have an option to block the person.
I think one day honesty box should reveal, EVERYONE, instead of having the question marks one day they should have their name, LOL…
if your profiles’ security setting are set on that only your friends can view your profile then its impossible for anybody to write in your honesty box without being friends wiht you.. and also i wonder if theres a way to find out who sent these anonymous things.. hmm
everyone keeps saying that you have to add the application to write in someone elses..but it CLEARLY sayds that anyone one of your friends, if they had the app or not, can still write in yours….so using the people that have honesty box to narrow it down is not a way to do it