Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly busy at the moment. Following on from the company’s recent purchase of Oculus, there are now reports that members of Facebook’s management have been meeting with Secret, a social networking application that allows users to share information anonymously.
Although the premise of Facebook has always been to try and get at much information as possible out of its users to continue to build and enhance its social graphs, this does not come as a total surprise as in an interview with Bloomberg Zuckerberg stated that Facebook is considering developing an app that will allow users to be anonymous.
The way the Secret app works is to add contacts into individual user’s phones without adding any personal information even their identity. The app then connects with the Secret network allowing users to communicate with each other without needing to sign in or use any kind of user ID. This is particularly popular among younger users who are getting increasingly savvy about the uses that companies have for their personal information and more importantly, how anything they say online effective becomes “on the record” as it is permanently recorded in one form or another.
Secret is not the only option for Facebook however, there are other apps offering similar services such as Whisper and Snapchat or Facebook could simply be doing more in depth research ahead of launching a similar app of its own. This seems less likely given that Facebook appears to be ready to swallow up any company that it wants at the moment and with over $10 billion in cash available who can blame them for this strategy?
