I made something similar to this (it was an Irc bot that allowed tweeting via a command on a fairly large channel) and got shut down, my host subpoenaed (Linode at the time) and eventually got a visit from law enforcement at my house due to people sending abusive tweets. Just a heads up, I would add moderation sooner than later.
Judging by the fact you have to DM "to get send anonymous messages" (as per their profile description on Twitter) I would suggest it's not that hard to track in the event they need to report the end-user to law enforcement.
Whispererly is a twitter bot that allows you to send anonymous tweets by simply direct messaging it your tweets!
The bot can be used to joke around, express political views, give feedback to you're friends or any else you want it to be used for. We already have close to 200 tweets in the past two days and can't wait for what the Hacker News community comes up with!
Test it out, and if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop them in here.
Pretty obvious to the HN community, but perhaps worth making it obvious before this becomes a public thing that this is definitely not even remotely law-enforcement proof, just in case someone thinks of using this to tweet something illegal. You know it's only a matter of time...
Again, how do you actually know the author hasn't thought about it? I'm not praising the attitude your referring to, I'm criticizing your prejudices against the author, the baseless assumption that (s)he fits the label of "oblivious privileged SV tech nerd" you've decided to attribute.
If it takes you more than 30 seconds to come to "An app that allows anonymous public messages on a social network currently wracked by abuse is not a good idea", you haven't been thinking.
My goal is for this to be used for: giving feedback, poking fun at companies and politicians, or maybe having a fun time with your friends. I hope it is not used for abuse and I do have ways of prevent abuse in place!
I thought about this a while back. I'd imagine it would be better to not use DMs and just have them create an account on your site so as to not tie them together. I had thoughts about twitter eventually banning the account, so you'd probably need an account creation script (possibly use the handle of the account being mentioned plus _w added to the end). It would also be a good idea to add language filtering and check the tweet against a database of abusive words so as to really slow down the abuse. I thought about this as an employee feedback tool at first, but everyone could use a little anonymous constructive feedback. Keep at it, many of the problems can be solved with a little creativity. Good luck :D
I would be careful about "guaranteeing 100% anonymity" too. I think that would very quickly not be the case should law enforcement get involved after your service is used to send threatening messages to someone it shouldn't.
Ya pretty much don't ever use this app if you actually want to be anonymous. DM's are logged and I really doubt the author would not comply if the Feds came knocking.
What's with using *ly names that aren't on a .ly domain? I'm extremely likely, especially with a long and somewhat contrived name like whisperer-ly, to misremember the web address if it's a faux .ly.
A username isn't the same as anonymity. You can look through my comment history (and as it happens get a pretty good idea of what I do and where I come from). And my username relates pretty closely to my real name. That isn't much protection of my identity.
Total anonymity (no username, no identity) opens the door for anyone to say anything. In some cases that's good. But IME, it is a benefit that ia mainly used by the dregs .