Other People’s Secrets

This is oddly compelling: reading the secrets people submit to a website with complete anonymity. It's true. Check out Post Secret.

Part of what's interesting is that the postcards upon which these confessors lay bare their secrets are handmade. Lots of collages, ransom-note style writing, interesting clip art, and many other unique and artistic ways to visualize their secrets.

It reminds me of a web project I was part of in during the heyday of the the dot-coms where any good idea would be soaked in venture-capital money. It was called Bdeep, and its purpose was to allow someone with a concern to invite their friends to "be deep" with them online. Here's the premise: suppose you want to know what your friends and family really think about something you're planning to do: get married, go back to school, join the army, get a tongue ring--whatever. You could just ask (but hey, it was the dot-com era and everything was going to the web!), but there's always social niceties and worries about hurt feelings to get in the way.

Enter Bdeep: you go online, enter some info and set up your questions, then invite friends by their e-mail addresses to log on, answer the questions, and give honest feedback. The website would ensure anonymity of the responders by requiring multiple invitees and not alerting you about the responses until more than one had responded. (We had other ideas to prevent gaming of the system, too.) Of course, you couldn't see all your friends' deep feedback without paying a bit. (Hey, we weren't in it for just the fun of it!).

Despite many meetings, a business plan, and a few revisions of the website, it never got off the ground. That's mostly due to the constraints of family, school and the regular nine-to-five. But it sure was fun and exciting at the time.

Anyway... read PostSecrets and be glad you don't have to pay to wallow in your voyeuristic tendencies.

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