Most of us would probably agree that social networking is reaching its limits. Between social network fatigue and the increasing multiplication of niche social networks (I’ve seen announcements of at least three different networks for dogs and their owners recently), this particular corner of the web is threatening to go beyond maturity to self-parody any day now. That’s why I perked up a bit when I ran across Hikkup, a new service that keeps the networking but loses the social part.
The idea behind Hikkup is to enable anonymous conversations on the web. You use their web site to enter a conversation starter (they suggest things like “How do I handle my love life?” or “Would you steal if you wouldn’t get caught?”) and choose from a variety of methods to send it out to a list of people: e-mail, instant messages, MySpace widget, or just through a link that you can paste anywhere you want. If you use one of their broadcasters, you can be anonymous yourself; in any case, the respondents can post answers anonymously through the Hikkup web site, which tracks the whole as a threaded conversation and offers e-mail notification of replies to anyone who’s interested.
As it’s being presented, Hikkup is aimed at very frothy conversations; their tagline is “Ask questions and get anonymous answers about dating, love, relationships, friendship, style and more.” But given how simple it is to set up an anonymous conversation here, it might also have a more serious use as a way for web workers to conduct market research and get customer feedback. For the cost of a moment of setup and a pasted link, you could ask visitors anything from “what do you think of the new color scheme?” to “are we wasting your time with too many conference calls?” and get anonymous feedback.
Hm…
That does sound like it could be a good idea…
but…
If you’re asking for advice – it could be anyone! “Duh – that’s the purpose of the site” is what you may be saying – but look at it this way.
If I ask for advice on lets say, dating. For all I know – I could get advice from a rapist. Or end up getting a bunch of porn links.
The possibilities are endless.
But on the flip side of the coin, welcome to the web.
I dunno.
Just my first thoughts of mine.
It does have potential though!
Hi Brian, thanks for the comment…
Mike summed it up well. Hikkups are easy to create, easy to distribute, disposable, scoped, private spaces where you can have conversations with people you know. Therefore, the random rapist scenario is hopefully not likely…
So two uses for Hikkup in social settings are: Get honest answers by letting friends respond anonymously. Ask questions without the risk of embarrassment by masking yourself.
Like Mike mentioned, we also see professional verticals for Hikkup. We just released a widget as a first step.
Roupen N.
CEO, hikkup.com
Nice idea. I’ve always thought the social networks are a limited beast. We don’t always need more relationships, but we do always need more information.
What ever happened to using good old fashioned forums to network. That’s the problem these days the art of conversation (spread over days/weeks/months) is dead.
[...] it looks like it could already be here, according to this great post from WebWorkerDaily, who are espousing the potential virtues of new start-up Hikkup, which promotes anonymous networking. Bookmark [...]
Honestly, this sounds an awful lot like the early days of ICQ. I was in college at that time, and housemates used to use it as a conversation starter, as well as a place to just look for people to chat with. Perhaps it’s not just that we’re getting social network fatigue, but that we’re getting a social network redundancy.
And if it’s totally anonymous, how can you guarantee you’re not getting an answer from a troll? I’d hesitate to make any business decisions based on anonymous answers.
[...] tegengas) hierop ook toe. Webworker Daily presenteert dan ook de ‘nieuwe doorbraak’: unsocial networking. Met de dienst Hikkup kan anoniem (en dus asociaal) genetwerkt worden. Vragen kunnen gesteld worden [...]
Hi Tish…. Hikkup is fire and foremost about communicating with friends and people that you know. So the “troll” shouldn’t enter the picture. Its peer initiated, to addresses that you know. Soon, we will be adding verified “unmasks”, so you’ll know who is who on the other side of th conversation.
[...] Bookmark Sharing – The folks behind Hikkup (which we looked at a while back) have now released a Firefox extension to allow easy use of their service with any [...]