A new mobile app from Facebook could prove to be a cause of concern for CIOs and IT managers. Facebook Rooms, the latest in a series of niche apps developed by Facebook's Creative Labs division, lets users anonymously create and join small online communities based on specific topics.
Anonymous sharing app Whisper has come under a cloud after a newspaper report charged it with tracking the location of its users, including those who have asked not to be followed.
After years of cajoling their users into sharing every thought, emotion and selfie, online firms are seeing that providing more private online spaces might also be profitable.
Every day, countless individuals and groups are victimized on social networks. The abusers, detached and cloaked in anonymity, often take on different personas as they shame, troll, incite and denigrate others with relative impunity. The ramifications can be devastating and, until recently, the majority of social media companies failed to acknowledge -- let alone confront -- the vulgarity and vicious threats that fly so freely on their platforms.
The road to revenue for ephemeral and anonymous apps like Snapchat, Secret and Whisper is uncharted. How these social apps will ever achieve a level of revenue that would justify their sky-high valuations is foggy at best.
Deliberate status updates are losing luster as quick, impromptu, short-lived activity on social media gathers momentum. If the first phase of social media was a massive effort to share our online identities, this current wave is all about fleeting encounters.