The app ‘Secret’ and the reasons for its success.

The app ‘Secret’ and the reasons for its success.

This app debuted four months ago and it has had a great success.

Part of it’s success is that ‘Secret’ is part of a new wave of anonymous social apps that can be seen as a reaction against social networks like Facebook, where everything that users post is tied to their identity. A few examples of these are ‘Whisper’, a ‘Secret’ rival, lets users see anonymous posts from anyone on the app. ‘Snapchat’, while not an anonymous network, lets users send messages that quickly “disappear”, in contrast to posts on Facebook, which are hard to remove.

Here’s now it works: Newcomers register their email address and those of their contacts, if their contacts agree. The identities are masked as users share updates that are visible to others on Secret without knowing who the posts come from. The only identifiers are “friends,” “friends of friends” or the name of the state or country from where a post comes from. Posts that receive “likes” are broadcast to more users.