Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

There are some things in life you just can’t share with family, or even your closest friends. It’s no wonder anonymous apps such as WhisperText, LLC (Whisper), Open Garden Inc.’s FireChat, Secret Inc. and Cloaq LLC are gaining so much traction.

Because of this anonymous confession trend, Facebook, Inc. is said to be on the verge of launching its own anonymous chat app. The anonymous exchange is rumored to be a standalone mobile app that allows users to connect with Facebook contacts with the use of pseudonyms to hide their real identity.

However, one concern that may be on the minds of Facebook users is the source of the app itself. After betraying users’ trust through manipulative social experiments and questionable advertising tactics, can Facebook’s global user base trust that their anonymous identity will stay separate from their public profile?

Though popular anonymous apps claim to keep users completely anonymous, it has been proven that people can be identified through clever digging. So how can Facebook’s anonymous sharing app be different from the various anonymous sharing apps already available on the market?

5 ways Facebook’s anonymous app could beat rivals

A totally separate app

Facebook has so far done well in resisting any urge to re-brand Instagram, even after its billion-dollar acquisition. After losing out on Snapchat, perhaps Facebook would rather build its own anonymous chat app rather than acquiring an existing platform. But there are lessons to be learned from the Instagram buy.

To be a truly standalone app, Facebook’s anonymous service should be totally be devoid of anything that can be identified as something that belongs to Facebook. It needs a fresh new look — ditch the blue color scheme and use a different user interface. Facebook may also want to consider avoiding all means of a user connecting the anonymous app to Facebook’s service, which would include tapping users’ contacts, as even this could lead to a deductive method of uncovering one’s true identity.

Not using identifiers

Reports indicate that Facebook’s anonymous app will be a standalone app from Facebook’s core service, but will allow users to connect to contacts anonymously. So technically, you can choose to reveal who you are if you want to, if not, just use an alias.

This anonymous app will be better if it does not use any information that can identify a user such as a phone number, tying it up to the user’s Facebook account, or asking for an email address. Users can just be assigned a random username, no signup required. This way, no user name can be tied to a specific user.

.Strong anti-bullying policy

Anonymous sharing apps are great mechanisms to spread gossip or uncover juicy secrets. As such, these services can also be a great way to vent problems when there’s no one to talk to, but such candid sharing can also embolden users to instigate bullying behavior. The app needs to be able to suspend or block a user, probably based on the user’s IP address or device ID, when bullying has been reported or spotted.

 .Eye-catching images and fonts

Have you heard about Super? It’s a new app currently in beta that’s straddling the two worlds of anonymous sharing and Instagram-like imaging. Super allows you to use an alias and share posts with friends, everyone, or people nearby, but what makes it different is the image attached to the post.

Based on what a user writes, the app generates an image to accompany the it. Each post becomes a dice-roll, generating new “art”, combined with bold fonts. Facebook could offer a similarly intriguing experience, improving it by allowing users to change the image if they are not satisfied with the machine-generated art. Users could also be allowed to edit the font and text color to their liking before publishing a post.

.Plugging on Facebook

Though it was stated earlier that this anonymous sharing app should be completely separate from Facebook, should the social networking giant decide to leverage its massive user base to drive interest and traffic to the anonymous app, shared secrets could be included in users’ news feed without divulging the identity of the poster.

It’s not entirely different from tactics used by Secret or Whisper, where you’ll find promoted and voted posts displayed proudly on the homepage. Should this method succeed, Facebook would prove trustworthy amongst users.