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.
This app requires a Facebook account. Facebook is a service that all but defines itself on identity verification.
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).
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
> WUT SENDS A MESSAGE TO ALL FRIEND WHO HAVE WUT.
> ** Requires Facebook right now, sorry. **It isn't a contract just a word choice that guides people to the expectation of how the app works.
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.
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.
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.