'Secret' is a social network where no user knows who else is posting, who has left comments, or if the posts are true or not. The app has picked up a lot of buzz since its launch late last year, and it has picked up over $12 million in funding. With the launch of the news 'Dens' feature, has Secret revealed the first steps to monetizing people's intimate thoughts?
By the very nature of Secret, the metadata alongside each secret has to be held somewhere. The app lets me know that I have friends in the network (but I don't get to know who they are). The friends circle also includes friends of friends, presumably to bump up the numbers and keep the friends tab in the application as busy as possible while still implying that 'you will know all the people writing these secrets.'
Anyone can register and post their own secret to the service. You have some artistic control over the background image to create a meme-like square picture. People can leave comments on these posts, mark them as liked, and subscribe to them so they are alerted when any other activity happens on that secret.
Given those very social functions, there is obviously some identity work going on in the background to tie in friends lists, alerts, and track the secrets and elements you have interacted with. The app may be called 'Secret,' but it is also about trust.
Secret is a fascinating look into the human psyche. How that becomes a business that can justify the $12.7 million already invested in the company is likely their biggest secret. Yesterday's news of a 'closed beta' for Secret groups might be one clue as to how founders Chrys Bader-Wechseler and David Byttow plan to create a return for their investors.
The groups (called 'Dens') creates another circle of users. As well as the full timeline of secrets, and the secrets of your friends, a Den will show up as yet another stream, but this time only from a specific group of people who both participate in that Den, and are specifically posting to that Den. Secret's vision is that this would work well in an office environment, college dorm, or similar close-knit social circle:
That’s why we’re creating a new way to share on Secret. Secret Dens brings a new layer to your Secret stream, giving you a private, company-specific Den to share anything you’re thinking —kept within the walls of your workplace.
Our invite-only pilot of Dens follows an experiment at Secret HQ, where the 16 of us can share anything and everything we want — just with our team. After enjoying our inside jokes, updates and secrets in our Den over the last month, we’re confident that any company will love having one of its own.
A tool to capture the private chatter and idle gossip that happens in the workplace... If that is the route Secret is going down it's rather audacious, although I would stress that there is no indication that this will be anything more than a free feature at the moment. But without a big push to advertising, this looks like a potential income stream further down the line.
Of course, Secret may just be this bubble's pets.com. It is a frothy application with no visible income streams at the moment. While I do have it installed on my phone, I rarely feel the need to open it and see what people are posting. For me the internet is a wonderful way to create emotional connections and trust between people over long distances. I'm a long way from Secret's target market.
That said, a twelve million dollar investment is still twelve million dollars, and you would not throw that at a start-up without the potential being there. To me this all points to a business model... Secret is not in this to be a 'Benevolent Uncle', it's not in to to show you display adverts about your darkest desires, it's in it to be a white label gossip column for the world's workplaces.
That's going to be an even trickier privacy path to navigate through that the personal privacy issues already being dealt with. What will a company do when there is a potentially criminal act mentioned on a company's Secret Den? Will it remain private then? Will they have to head over to Secret with a warrant from a judge to find out who is breaking the company rules? Anyone using Secret should take a lot of time to read over the terms and conditions, and the privacy guidelines that the company will be using. No doubt anyone using the new Dens feature will have some additional clauses when it leaves private beta.
If Secret can navigate those issues and maintain the brand, then the start-up might be on to something. But don't tell anyone I said that.
