Wizters, making you socially anonymous

“We are the generation of Social Media, Our biggest Revolution is a Tweet of 141 characters.”
― Sandra Chami Kassis

The social aspect of the web has been quite astonishing. No one before 2004 thought online social networking can be something this big that almost all the Internet companies will have to go “Social” to gain people’s attention. When Facebook started showing the potential of Online Social Networking (this is how everyone remembers, Friendster and Mysapce are dispensable ), it caught everyone’s imagination and spawned an urge to create more social networks for special needs. And now that we are connected through multiple social networks, do we really share everything that we want? Social networking brought privacy and identity exposure issues for users and the only solution that appears first in the list is, Anonymity. There are things that people can’t share because they are afraid that everyone will know who shared it. These things are their voice, their thoughts, their confessions, things that they want everyone to know, but they cannot. This is how Wizters comes in the picture.

Wizters, is a social network that serves as the medium of online anonymity. Its hard to define what “social” anonymity is because according most people a person cannot be social while being anonymous. But we are trying to break this barrier of anonymity and social networking. Wizters is a social network first and foremost, because it helps in connecting you with the people you know in real life but the only thing that is different here is the way you connect to them.

Every person has a current / active social circle like colleges, schools, offices etc. Wizters divides people in their respective social circle, called Networks. Odds are very high that you know most of the people in your social circle of everyday life and so you must also have a lot of things to say to the people in it. So, Wizters solves this problem by putting you in your relevant network and then whatever you share is anonymous to the people in it, but they get the message, they get what you want to say. Another cool thing that Wizters has brought to the table is sharing direct and private posts with your Facebook friends. This opens up avenues for the birth of a totally different online social practice or an anonymous ecosystem.

If we put Wizters aside and focus on what happened few months ago on Facebook. The flood of college confession and compliment pages came in and people welcomed these pages, they welcomed the idea of anonymity. Thousands of likes and hundreds of posts shared per day on a single page and yet people were hungry for more but these pages lost their importance because they raised moderation issues and more than that the fact that anonymity cannot survive on conventional social networks. A piece of web was meant to be cut out for this thing.

The idea of Wizters was born in the summers of 2011 and it has made a lots of progress since then. It is available for web, Windows Phone and Android (updated apps will be relaunched this month). It is now being developed as a part of PreCog@IIITD.

Wizters, for its motive can be called a social anonymity start-up which aims not only to provide this service on web and mobile but also works to counter the issues generated by online anonymity, like moderation and handling misuse of such services. It is one of the reason why Like-a-little, one of the promising and very well funded anonymity start-up from California got shut down. But where Wizters is trying to head, it can become a revolution in social media instead of 141 characters tweet.