Wait, WUT?

http://x.naveen.com/post/83436808746/wait-wut

by socmoth • 12 years ago

63 43 12 years ago

x.naveen.com

cottonseed• 12 years ago

from the App store:

  > WUT SENDS A MESSAGE TO ALL FRIEND WHO HAVE WUT.
  > ** Requires Facebook right now, sorry. **

socmoth5• 12 years ago

Paul here. Happy to answer any questions you may have.

facebook login is annoying but did get us out the door. poor grammar is intentional.

We used to have the words "WUT" repeated 200x in the app store copy, but Apple politely told us that wasn't good enough. We had more than a couple people tell us it was great though.

ethanhunt_2• 12 years ago

Are you both the creator of WUT and the author of the original piece?

EDIT: posting too fast, so I'll just edit this post. I think you should edit your blog post with a disclaimer that you're a creator of WUT. It's not that I don't like reading about the products created by HN members (I like it a lot), but I (and I assume others) do want to know when the author has a vested interest in what he's writing about. The piece is interesting, thank you for writing and posting.

lobotryas• 12 years ago

facebook login is annoying but did get us out the door

Do you plan to allow for a truly anonymous registration option that doesn't require anything beyond an email address (no facebook, no scanning my contacts, no phone number)? If so, when should I look for it because that's the feature that would make me try out WUT.

ryandrake• 12 years ago

Not sure how you can call these apps anonymous or "semi-anonymous". I tried Secret a month or so ago, and the first thing it asked me for was my phone number. So, this one requires Facebook? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "anonymous".

ethanhunt_2• 12 years ago

Agree on Facebook, but how would you get around the phone number for Secret? I don't have the app, but as I understand it, it uses your contacts list to find out who to send messages to (i.e., the phone number is the username that it uses to know to send your friends' posts to you).

socmoth5• 12 years ago

You probably don't (but you knew that). But that is why we explicitly call it semi anonymous not anonymous. (with no quotes)

It isn't a contract just a word choice that guides people to the expectation of how the app works.

chadwickthebold• 12 years ago

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.

socmoth5• 12 years ago

IRC! Usenet! BBSes!

The last era of the net (since 2004) a lot of stuff went full real names, after facebook made it ok to put your name on the internet.

We've started (re) discovering ways to connect which are less about real names.

deepinsand2• 12 years ago

I've never used WUT, but was intrigued by the anecdote at the end: "Sun’s out; in Washington square park. Who’s around?”

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.

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.

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.

socmoth5• 12 years ago

You are totally correct on the cold start problem. ;)

tormeh• 12 years ago

I think some of it may simply be that hanging out is with strangers is not a way most people want to meet people. Meeting at events or places where simply by being there you have a mutual interest is more attractive for many.

deepinsand2• 12 years ago

Sorry, I should have said "pseudo-anonymous". At least in Secret, I can see how many degrees of separation I am to someone via our phone address book. I've since edited the original post.

It's anonymous enough that you don't feel the consequences of making a FB status update that no one comments on, but with enough identity to not be creepy.

Dewie• 12 years ago

I think some of it may simply be that hanging out is with strangers is not a way most people want to meet people. Meeting at events or places where simply by being there you have a mutual interest is more attractive for many.

Yeah, I don't really see strangers hanging out. That would be kind of weird. For a bunch of people to gather in one place, with no overall goal than to talk, hang out, perhaps have some background music but not much else. Maybe some smoking breaks. And then maybe for all of them to go to another place, maybe more towards the city, where you have to pay to do the same thing, that is, hanging out with people with whom you have no obvious common interests except for doing this hanging out thing, and in a much more crowded place.

Wait... what if you added alcohol to the above? Then I can totally imagine it. :)

pantalaimon• 12 years ago

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.

grinich• 12 years ago

If you Google "wut app" it's the first hit.

compare• 12 years ago

I'm working on a search product now. I find it really fascinating that many people immediately know and have adopted this "specific-type general-type" query structure, whereas many others have no idea.

It feels like we're on the verge of slowly evolving a new human-computer communication language. Definitely within the next 20 years it will happen. Not just a list of instructions or model descriptions like programming languages are, for example you can't translate an arbitrary Engish sentence into a programming language. No, I think this time we're watching a full language, in the linguistic sense, evolve in front of us.

Of course, search engines will also have to evolve beyond the "do-know-go" communication types that they're married to now, to get to the next stage.

justin• 12 years ago

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wut-semi-anonymous-chat./id7...

aniro2• 12 years ago

I am not really sure what people mean when they say "anonymous" anymore.

This app requires a Facebook account. Facebook is a service that all but defines itself on identity verification.

kennywinker• 12 years ago

Anonymous to your friends, not anonymous to the service or law enforcement. There should be a word for this... maybe "pseudoanonymous"?

ganeumann• 12 years ago

Contingently Anonymous.

mahyarm• 12 years ago

I would call it curtain anonymous.

krapp• 12 years ago

'pseudonymous' I believe.

pit• 12 years ago

Anonymity theatre?

TeMPOraL4• 12 years ago

Because this is the default case, we need another word for the hypothetical "anonymous to all, including law enforcement and intelligence agencies". perfect anonymity?

aniro2• 12 years ago

Anonymous to my friends and no one else?

I guess I don't get the use case, as I would generally think anonymity from people I already am acquainted with would be the least useful (to me).

It really seems like there is an entire class of applications that have risen to answer problems that exist solely because of Facebook's dominance and policies (ie: data collection/retention policies and insistence on identity).

chippy• 12 years ago

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.

stephengillie• 12 years ago

That token breaks the very anonymity in the first place. The very essence of anonymity is having no reputation, no information whatsoever.

wtbob• 12 years ago

No, the very essence of anonymity is have no tie to one's physical identity.

No reputation or information is a recipe for meaninglessness; as a reader I have neither the time nor the tools to fully evaluate every statement ever made to me; I must use heuristics to aid my reading (e.g. I will almost certainly ignore anyone who claims the moon landings were hoaxes; it's not worth my time to investigate his claims).

I'm actually very excited by the idea of anonymous reputation, as it could enable all sorts of the things needed to have a well-run global network without enabling physical assaults on persons.

frozen_tomato• 12 years ago

I wholeheartedly disagree with this, what you're essentially describing is just watered down identity. The whole point of the value of anonymity is that all posts are equal.

TeMPOraL4• 12 years ago

This is unrealistic and won't work in practice. If all posts are equal then all posts are equally worthless. It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation. If everyone is fully anonymous (in a stateless sense), then everyone is basically a "random internet dude".

joshu• 12 years ago

I quite enjoy WUT.

Wait, WUT?

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