Monday, July 8, 2013

An Anonymous Social Network for Real Friends. Truthly.me

Truthly.me

There are a lot of things that people can’t say to each other. For example, a girl can’t tell her friend that her red shoes don’t match her yellow dress, a husband can’t say to his wife that she gained weight, or a son can’t say to his politician father that he becomes too funny after the use of alcohol. There are many similar examples. The aim in all these cases is the same - to make our close ones better. The reasons for not telling the truth are that we worry the person will misunderstand us, take it wrongly or we just feel uneasy. But there are things that people must know about themselves, and if we can't say it openly, we can do it incognito. I’m sure even I have traits I don't notice, which are noticed by my family, friends and colleagues; but kept to themselves for some reason. I must know that, however, because I want to become better, improve myself or at least think about it. Truthly.me solves that problem…

Truthly.me is an anonymous social network which gives us an opportunity to tell our friends and relatives the things we want to say to them, but unable to do it face to face. The project is based on three main principles: anonymity, real friends, private messages.

Anonymity

If a person knows there is even 1% probability that the friend will find out who told them the truth, or in other words they will be «caught», they will refrain from speaking out. There’s no possibility of "being caught" on Truthly.me (of course if the person doesn’t mention their name in the message or write something about which only both of them know). There is no need to register on the website or provide any personal data, you just need to find your friend from the home page and send them a message.

Real friends

Reading the previous paragraph, you probably thought that anyone can send a message to anyone. Truthly.me is made to receive messages only from our close ones, who truly care about us. They are the people who have our telephone number, are in our Facebook friends list, or know things about us that strangers could not. So, by signing into the website, a person chooses their individual questions, which other people must answer before sending a message. Some of the questions I mentioned above. We developed the idea of Truth number in Truthly.me. It's like an online phone number. Users can share their Truth number on Facebook, which only their friends can see. In other words, such a message will appear on their Facebook wall: «Hi, my Truth number is 85434. You can tell me something that you can't say to my face.». So, if you have chosen "what's my Truth number?" as a «checking question», anyone who isn't in your Facebook friends list and therefore can't see your truth number, cannot send a message. «The checking questions» can be several at the same time. You can add your mobile, date of birth and so on.

Private messages

Before creating Truthly.me, we researched the market for a long time trying to find a similar projects. Although we didn’t find a project solving exactly the same issue, we found a number of projects based on anonymity. The astonishing thing in many cases was that messages were public, i.e. everyone could see them. In Truthly.me the messages, which you send to others, are private, i.e. no one can know about them - only you and the person who gets them. The person, who gets the message, can also reply to your message: to thank you, express the change in their mood or something other.

About the technical side

That’s all about the idea and implementation; now a little bit about the technical side. We think it is interesting, especially for programmers. Truthly.me is built on Node.js with MongoDB database and hosted on heroku.com. We use the responsive design (Twitter Bootstrap), i.e. it will work on different types of devices: smartphones, tablets and so on.

P.S. That’s all about Truthly.me. It’s a long awaited project for us and we believe it will help people around the world. Any feedback, comments or suggestions are most welcome.