Stuff like this is great. It's like watching kids who grew up in the Twitter/FB age rediscover anonymous internet forums and imageboards like 4chan. People like anonymous services because you literally don't need to filter what you are saying. That can lead to a whole lot of bad, but some really, really great nuggets of truth and goodness coming out - it feels like tapping into the collective subconscious of the internet.
I am not really sure what people mean when they say "anonymous" anymore.<p>This app requires a Facebook account. Facebook is a service that all but defines itself on identity verification.
I've never used WUT, but was intrigued by the anecdote at the end: "Sun’s out; in Washington square park. Who’s around?”<p>I've seen tons of apps that try to solve the "I want to hang out" problem. They all fail because cool people don't use those apps. Psuedo-anonymity can potentially solve this.<p>Some tried to do anonymous matching, but those had cold-start-network-effect problems. Psuedo-anonymous social networks might be able to back into a solution by attracting early adopters with their "gossip network" use case.<p>This reminds me of how Facebook backed into essentially being a status, photos, and events platform when it started life as a networked address book.
What we need is a form of anonymous / pseudo-anonymous reputation brokerage. Tokens that identify not a person, but how trusted or how well liked that token has been used. You control your tokens, what networks, where they are used. An older token is worth more to you, and to others that see it. The values associated to a token varies depending on the tokens around it. Upvotes, downvotes, activities, flags from the various places where the token is uses contributes to the values attached to the tokens. It's a fuzzy concept at the moment, but I think as these new generation of applications grow, one that we may see evolve.
It would be incredibly useful if there were a link to the App in question.
WUT isn't very googleable, it wasn't entirely obvious from the article that it's an iPhone exclusive App, not a website or available on Android.