I’m sure we’ve all had the situation on Twitter where you want to tweet something without it being attributed to you. Some users have separate accounts for these outbursts, but there’s still a chance those can be linked back to you. But a new service (which is really two new services) wants to make anonymous tweeting easy: Tweet From Above and Tweet From Below.
As their names imply, one of these services is meant to be used for good, while the other is meant for evil. Both allow you to use a third-party Twitter account to send out messages. While you might think that’s pointless, if you use it to @reply someone, they will obviously see the tweet, without knowing exactly who it is from.
As the debate over anonymous commenting on blogs continues on, it’s not surprising that this immediately strikes some users as an awful idea — and they’re letting everyone know through the anonymous Twitter account. At least the service makes it hard for spam bots to take advantage of it by requiring anyone to enter a CAPTCHA before sending the anonymous tweet. Of course, that’s also a huge barrier to entry as I completely mistyped the CAPTCHA no less than 3 times before I got it right.
The site also writes on it’s about page:
So have fun, be safe and be free, but don’t be stupid: Read our Terms of Use if you’re thinking of using our service for harrassment, threats, pornography, crime or other questionable activity.
And the Terms of Use page has a little more:
Just remember: what you do on TFA/TFB may be anonymous, but we do log your IP address and other identifying information. Don’t make us use it! This site is not meant for harrassment, threats, pornography, crime or other questionable activity, and we will happily ban users who use it questionably or turn their information over to the appropriate authorities.
So there you go, it’s not actually completely anonymous. Still, it seems like types of tweets they don’t want may come fast and furious, especially from the Tweet From Below site, which is basically asking for bad comments. We’ll see.
The sites were created by Junket Design.
[thanks Jason]
funny. that spam/troll twitter was from me.
well hopefully Tweet From Above bans you for trolling.
i don’t understand how complaining about trolling is trolling. but whatever. yes, ban me.
banned.
you guys wanna grab a room?
Every day I see twitter moving more and more back to what the internet has had since the very beginning: the anonymous BBS. Not only do they now have topics, but also anonymous posting. So the question is, why would anyone even bother when there are already great anonymous sites like http://f2bbs.com
I’m with Andre. Why have you two not been Rule 34′d on deviantART yet?
Why anonymous tweets? If this feature is made easy then maximum no. of tweets will be anonymous. It’s fact. It disrupts the purpose of social media for sharing news. Anonymous tweets are going to suck as in due course, spammers will invade the anonymous territory!
Wait so who is developing the service. You have Twitter in the crunchbase box above but I doubt they would allow a service like this.
Generally when we use twitter for sending anonymous mails, SPAM entry will be automatically high. So the CAPTCHA app does not act as a good barrier!
spam spam spam, because terms of use stop anything.
http://twitter....atus/3540450157 exactly.
yeah this is a train wreck already.
oh lord.
wait a min. this toolbar right below annoys me! can you please remove it.
just hit the little arrow button on the bottom right of the screen.
I keep hitting it every visit, and it keeps coming back. Firefox 3.0 on Vista.
Use the NoScript add-on for Firefox.
Forbid meebo.com scripts = no toolbar.
i had figured it out already but seriously it’s not a good addition to this blog. this is because i like TC :/
That little widget seems to be in every other techblog these days.
Stupid toolbar
Please remove the toolbar at the bottom, it prevents me from reading lines at the bottom of each view. I like to scroll with the keyboard with spacebar and when I do that, it scrolls past the content that was hidden by the toolbar so I never get to see it. Try reading your articles that way and see if it makes sense!
Sometimes there is no hide arrow and it also seems to affect the images on the page asking me to share it. This is way too intrusive for something I will never use. Thanks
Interesting. personally I’ll just tweet what I want. I don’t care if people know it’s from me or not.
yea where did this lower bottom feeder toolbar come from?
crypt, it comes from below
hahaha!
+1
I’m personally gonna use this to send myself reminders…!
4chan love in….3…2…1…annnnd action!
It certainly didn’t come from above
Damn, why did I not think of making this… so simple to implement… well, because I see no revenue in it.
This kindda services are available at a dime a dozen, and generally die out in less than an year.
http://bitchco.org/ – For the anonymous release of agency-induced angst
ENOUGH WITH THE GOD DANG TWITTER NEWS. WHO CARES…. PLEASE POST SOMETHING BESIDES STUPID DAMN TWITTER. IT IS TURING ME ONTO OTHER SOURCES AND BEGINNING TO MAKE ME HATE TECHCRUNCH
I KNOW. IT’S ALMOST AS ANNOYING AS TYPING WITH CAPS LOCK ON!!!!
TWITTERMANIACS ARE MORE ANNOYING
Oh please. That is so annoying. How about this?
HTTP Server Error 503
No available server to handle this request
This has been the homepage of Twitter.com for the past few hours.
I’m getting it too…
I’m waiting until they add some kind of affiliate link or ad to the end of all their tweets.
toolbar seriously needs to go.
I also hate the toolbar
I like to drag’n’share feature for pictures.
Guys, the drag & share feature along with the toolbar is making your site sluggish. Also it’s highly annoying.
I clicked to make it “go away” but it still lurks beneath… waiting to pounce like a very loud friend with an inferiority complex. “Hey look at what I can do!” “Want me to post that to twitter for ya… huh, huh, huh???”
LOL!
Hard to resist clicking the ad on the tool bar – very effective I say lol
what’s next? ‘tweet from behind’?
Fund it.
Hey guys – this is Seth from Meebo. Thanks for the comments on the bar. TechCrunch is the first content site to go live with it, so it’s definitely a learning experience for us. Definitely send any comments, etc, to comments at meebo. We’ll be making a bunch of upgrades / etc based on the feedback we get from everyone.
Jeremy – weird that the bar’s reappearing after you hit close. Do you have cookies off per chance? That’s how it remembers to keep it down. If not, would be great if you could ping so we can figure out what the bug is.
Jose – the toolbar shouldn’t make the site sluggish – it’s written in JavaScript and loads async to the page in an iframe. If it definitely is, please ping at the email address above – would love to figure out what’s going on there. Which browser are you using?
Thanks!
hey i like the image drag to share idea. how about also sharing text and links by highlighting it and dragging it?
thanks tenthings
what i can’t figure what’s the use of this toolbar … if it wants me share any item then there is already options available on the bottom of the post like Sharethis… it alone is enough to convince someone to share the post (not to mention retweet, techmemme etc). and do you think any person in his right mind visiting this blog would use this toolbar to ‘Chat’ with their friends i don’t chat with friends at facebook let alone at TC…. so it adds no value to this blog on the other hand it’s seriously too annoying that i couldn;t resist to talk about it, it could be great product, however i guess not for TC at least… in general i hate very web toolbar, i want to read the content the way it is and the way it should be… diggbar, facebookbar etc they generally don’t add any value to user experience except selling their own brand etc.
Hey Seth-
I dig your chatting tools but I wonder, what’s the goal for the tool bar? It feels like a feature for features sake & another ad location. I all ready have browser tool bar functions and it feels a bit forced in this situation. Yes I can and have turned “off” the tool bar but the arrow and the “drag to share” is still turned on.
I have a host of other tools to share and chat. It looks well designed but it feels like adding things that don’t really need to be here.
Maybe I am in the minority but it feels like those keyword, mouse over, pop ups – a little too much.
Browser is Firefox 3 and it does feel slower.
Thanks for listening.
Hey Jose – all totally good points. A bit of the thinking behind some of your thoughts:
The goal is to make it totally brain dead simple to share, in real time, across any social graph that users care about. That would obviously then drive more folks to TechCrunch, and drive up engagement, both which then help with monetization. The best analogy I can think of is that we’re trying to do for sharing of content from sites what the iPhone did for sharing of photos taken from your phone. When I had other cell phones, I could take photos and share them, but it wasn’t part of the “default flow” of the device. As a result, I took less pictures and never shared them. Once Apple made it insanely easy to share photos I took with their phone because it became so natural / default, I actually started taking more pictures and of course I shared them more.
Totally agree that there are a bunch of ways to share things built into sites already. I’m not sure, though, that we’ve yet found the best / most intuitive way to let users share things with people they want to, as an industry.
Without doubt there’s no way that we got version 1 of the bar for content sites totally right – this is a first go that we’re learning from. One of the things I take from your comment is whether there isn’t a way to make the bar more useful / interesting outside of real time communication / sharing. Definitely gonna have a think on that one
Thanks!
Well, the content sharing to different social networks is really great but I don’t quite understand what the point is of a IM system on a blog.
Perhaps you could have it interact with the comments in some way.
Hey Juan – very good idea. We’ve been thinking something similar
Just a point of interest – in the original designs the IM portion of the UI was “heavier.” It didn’t quite feel right, however. That’s when we moved to having IM be just another way to share up in the share dock along with Twitter, FB, email, etc. More sharing options will be coming too, of course. Thanks!
It seems to make the scrolling jerky and sluggish. Please try a page with and without that toolbar. I don’t think I am imagining this.
Looks like they ripped off TweetAnon (www.tweetanon.com), which I believe was developed by a former PayPerPost exec.
interesting toolbar! i’m still pondering what the benefits are for TC.
Hey Dan – from a partner perspective there are three things we’re shooting to help them with. First, we’re trying to make content really easily shareable across all social graphs. This would then hopefully drive up unique visits to the partner site. Second, we’re working to drive up engagement for our partners – that is, how much time users spend with the site and how much they engage in the community on the site. Third, we’re working to directly drive revenue for our partners. This happens both through a revenue sharing agreement on the ad that runs in the bar, and also by driving uniques and engagement for the site. Hope that makes sense
Please TC – Remove the Toolbar!
just close the toolbar and you will forget it is there
It’s a small toolbar. Why do you all care so much?
As I wrote above, it hides content at the bottom of the view and as I am used to scrolling with the spacebar, the page down via the spacebar will scroll past that hidden content, so I land up having to scroll back a bit every time I scroll forward. So I cannot use that bar at all. But hiding it doesn’t seem to make it persistent.
I personally don’t like things that popup and bring up stuff on the screen as I move my cursor, it is annoying.
Wow…that’s a great catch CommonMan. Hadn’t noticed we were impacting spacebar scrolling at all! We’ll definitely take a look at fixing that one. Thanks!
secrettweet.com – similar in nature, yet actually interesting.
Seth -
I like this toolbar UI better for meebo than meebo.com! Hmmm, can I use this UI on meebo.com instead of the window’ed UI? or is there an add-on for firefox or IE coming out that makes this appear at the bottom everywhere? As for the ad, well ads generally suck, but at least that one looks cool and is attractive to click on.
Hey B Reyes – ha…funny you should mention that. In the office we’ve kicked around the notion of using the toolbar UI at meebo.com. That’d leave a heck of a lot of background space – what would you do with it?
anonymous can be good. we just finished a project called bitwisdom, with a learning twist: bitofwisdom.com
Hate to say it, but WRT the toolbar, I first thought perhaps either I got an unapproved Safari update (I manually update) or had stumbled across my first Mac spyware. Really, really not a fan of anything that attaches itself to me or my browser without my explicit opt-in and permission.
Hey Allison – good feedback – thanks! No worries though – it’s all in JavaScript on the page itself, similar to the chat bar at FaceBook or MySpace. Once you lave the site, it’s gone.
It’s a usefull toolbar
this should be good. Hope it works.
AAfter Search has the anonymous Twitter feature for a while now. You just need to do
t? in the search box.
secrettweet & tellsecret do this too
I did this with twitter.com/confession a while ago and it didn’t end well after upsetting far too many people.
This is funny. We tried something of our own just for fun. We never tidied up the weekend project. Try it out at http://youtweetus.appspot.com/
Japanese users have @anontwit since 2007-04-19
http://anont.nipotan.org/
It looks that Japanese have more desire to tweet anonymously, though the service is almost forgotten by everyone (almost no tweets recently).
Office Evil had anonymous Tweeting 8 months ago and @TechCrunch is one of the followers.
And Office Evil doesn’t give a damn about your IP address…
EasySecured has launched a twitter sign-in client that creates anonymous accounts that is created by the computer and you can sign-in without entering your user name and password.
This is pretty funny. I can see where trouble could start from such a site but I can also see the benefits, it could open up some lines of communication on some very serious and touchy issues where people otherwise may not want to speak up. This can give an outlet to that serious political rant that has been brewing. Or whatever may come out.
Having the two separate domain names is GENIOUS too. Otherwise it would only be a matter of time before somebody came out with the opposite, they just did it all at once. Good call.