Remember when everyone kept warning you about what not to post on Facebook, lest your digital footprint become covered in smut and beer? Well, now there is a wave of anonymous apps coming at us like crazy, so you don't even have to worry about your online reputation any more.
Wanna gossip? Just sign in to an anonymous chat with your best friends and sling mud like there's no tomorrow. That's the promise of rumr and other anonymous chatting apps like Secret and Whisper. You can also use the services for clandestine purposes, but since it's anonymous, it's bound to get a bit more questionable. Hence its appeal.
Rumr is an anonymous messaging app for friends where you can spout off your thoughts to one another without putting your name or face to the words you are typing. Each person in the chat is represented by a different color, so that it truly feels anonymous. You can see who's in the chat if you're in the chat though, so it's not totally secret, but you still won't know who is who.
CEO and founder James Jerlecki, worked on the app with fellow co-counders Collin Vance and Andrew Chae. The triad had a lot of success with the free textPlus app, which lets users send free texts and calls, so they decided to make another messaging app that was a bit more personal and secretive. Enter rumr, the ultimate incognito messaging app for gossiping with friends.
The founders also imagine that rumr could be used to hash out feelings and hold difficult conversations within friend groups, co-workers or family members, without anyone knowing who said what or subjecting others to their tears/screams/teeth grinding/etc. At its heart, though, rumr is about friends talking about top secret topics.
"We've spent a lot of time thinking about messaging and to us it always seemed there was something missing - as far as a place to let your guard down, a place where you didn't always have to be perfect," Jerlecki said. "We wanted to create a chat experience that was more open and free-flowing so we thought the way to do that was essentially anonymity - but controlled anonymity."
"If you look at Whisper it's just out to people I have no connection with, I don't really know them," Jerlecki said. "And even Secret, it's a smaller sub-set of that - it's your address book - but who's in your address book? I have thousands of contacts in my address book.. I don't know who most of those people are. That to me is not compelling. What is compelling is a group of people that I know, that I trust on some level, that I can truly be myself with, that I can't do on Facebook... I need a private forum to a place where I can let my guard down and that normally is with my friends."
Rumr's creators say that their app is different from all the other anonymous apps that are currently out there, but in the end, the users will decide, just like they always do.
