There are times in life when all you want is to talk to somebody, to unburden your heart and let out all the pain, fear, guilt, or whatever it is that is weighing down your heart like a leaden weight. But how difficult it is to do so, even when surrounded by a loving family, friends and colleagues. Sometimes, we don’t want to transfer our sorrows and fears to our loved ones. Sometimes, we are just afraid of being misunderstood, or thought worse of. At such a times, people may often wish for finding a person who would just listen, and maybe advice, without being influenced by our pain and fears, someone who won’t be judgemental, or at least someone whose wrong opinion of us wont hurt us even more.
How can that be, one might wonder. A person who loves us would naturally be influenced by our feelings and actions. Well then, what about strangers? What if you can talk to total strangers? Talk anonymously, just speak out what you want, confess whatever you wish to confess to lighten your heart, with no fear of hurting or offending anyone?
Just such a freedom has now been made possible by a newly launched app called ‘Confess.’ Confess is India’s first anonymous social network app that lets you broadcast your thoughts to strangers and lets those strangers respond to it as they deem fit. Nobody knows who said what, but messages are conveyed, feelings are shared and it can be hoped that at least a few lonely hearts might feel the better by it.
Well, the newly launched app Confess allows users to post their messages anonymously. While posting, the person can choose whether the message is to be displayed to his or her connections on the app, or not. Yes, even though the messages are posted anonymously, the app still allows building of social network by allowing the users to add friends from their Gmail account, or Facebook account, or by other means.
To use the app, the user must register using either a Facebook account or a Google Account. While registering, the app will ask for a certain permissions. Be sure to read those permissions and selecting what you wish to allow and what not. Specifically, many users of the app would probably not want their family to be informed that they are registering to an anonymous confessing service!
Well, registering into the app is fairly simple. But I don’t see any way to delete the account if a user wishes to stop using the service.
The user interface of the app is fairly simple and pleasant-looking. When you launch the app, the first screen will show you posts from your friends, but I’m guessing, you won’t be able to see which post is from which friend. The second tab would lead you to the messages posted by other people in your area. Now, I’m very doubtful about this feature as this tab showed me many messages posted by people within 1 km of where I live. And since at that time the app page on Google Play showed on 500 + downloads, it’s highly unlikely that so many people from around me were or are using it. But anyway, the third tab would lead you to the messages that have been made Popular, thanks to the numbers of likes and comments they have gathered. If you open the Menu on the left, you can also access the Latest conversation. Other options on the Menu allow you to view your own posts, send messages, view friends, search for a particular message (you can’t search out a person), and settings.
When a person posts a confession on the app, other users can comment on it, like it, or send messages.
What I especially liked about the app was the vibrant coloured cards on which the confessions get posted. Photographs can also be shared of course. And I very much fear that very soon, a crowd of such photographs would flood its stream that would be of the kind that you would not want to be seen by your kids or elders. Already there are people displaying their tattoos and posting obscene messages.
When I tried the app on the first day, most of the messages I found seemed either forced witticism, most probably posted by other reviewers of the app, or messages of the nature that would have been covered by long beeps, had they been vocalized instead of being written anonymously.
But in just a few days, I am seeing more and more people actually using the app to seek comfort for their troubled feelings. I’m seeing people airing their fears, doubts, guilts and hurts, and other people responding in comforting and encouraging way. Of course, since the messages are anonymous, some of these responses can be scornful and mocking too. But on the whole, I saw today many strangers reaching out to seek comfort, and many strangers reach out to give comfort.
On the whole, it was interesting to scroll through the confessions made by strangers. At times it made me sad when I read a sad message by someone. At times it tickled me when I read a witty comment by someone else. At times, it made me thoughtful when somebody’s message seemed to resonate some shade of my own heart. One the whole, going through Confess app was quite an interesting experience.
However, it has a lot of scope of improvement. It would be great, for example, if it was possible to filter the displayed content using categories while browsing through the confessions posted by other users. Of course, it is already possible to search for a topic specific confessions. But it would be great if the users had the option to control the content displayed in the message streams, even when they are not specifically looking for a certain kind of content.
