Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site

secretpoke.com

119 pointsbjonathan113 comments

Ok, let me see. Back in 2005 a friend sent me one of these crush anonymously. I didn't want to guess on the site who it was, but I wanted to know who it was. They had this feature where you enter your email if you forgot your password. So, I thought to myself, not many of my friends would know about this site and whoever it is was probably the only person of my friends to be on it. So, I enter the list of female friends to recover their passwords[Just finished my undergrad, had loads of free time]. If they weren't on it the site came back with an error message. In the end, I came across one person who it was successful for.

Point being be careful with your error messages they might give away your users anonymity.

Lol ok nice one we gonna fix that like right now :)

Thank to your twisted mind :p

Thats why I love HN you always find your way around ;)

Avoiding information leakage, whether in terms of error cases (e.g. incorrect padding on crypto showing a different error, leading to a padding oracle attack) or in terms of user-facing content (e.g. exposing whether or not a username or email exists in the system) can be difficult. That said, you should always err on the side of showing a single message rather than multiple -- in this case, always show success. This is common practice in certain things, like always showing "incorrect username or password" rather than "incorrect username" and "incorrect password" messages, but most people don't consider it for other things.

The less data you give to users about state that isn't necessarily theirs, the better.

Ew no, don't always show success, there surely has to be a more elegant solution. I have multiple email addresses and sometimes I'll use a different one for a different service, if I enter email@website.com when I used email@anotherwebsite.com and you show success when it's the wrong one, I'll be waiting for an email that will never appear...

Maybe HN can work out a good solution collectively? I can only think of a secondary authentication piece, but then that's also possible to be forgotten.

How about show success, but adjust the confirmation e-mail accordingly. For example, if the e-mail address is not registered you could say something like "We received a request to recover your password on our service but see that you are not registered for our service with this e-mail address." ?

That's good; that'll mean fishing expeditions like this will warn the, er, fish.

I considered this, but it makes an easy way for someone to cause the site problems. I guess coupled with captcha it could work, but someone could send a lot of emails to different people, if enough mark it as spam they might have problems as it is TECHNICALLY unsolicited, but I guess at the same time I could do the same with registering...

A possible solution is to get the email account holder to send an email to lostpassword@website.com. Auto-reply with a password reset form, or a welcome email in the case with no existing account (maybe you could fast-track account creation here, with a link "Oops, please delete this account. I didn't mean to do that.").

It doesn't really solve the problem of figuring out which email address you used to create your account, but it allows you to provide feedback to the user that the account does/does not exist.

An alternative solution would be to just email whatever account you enter on the website, with the appropriate wording depending whether or not they have an existing account, but this approach seems like it'd be too easy to spam random people.

I think the solution is pretty simple... just be transparent and say for security reasons you can't reveal whether or not the user exists.

Yes, just saying this should be sufficient - "If your email address is our database, you would shortly receive an email to reset your password".

Using Facebook/Twitter/OpenID accounts for login would probably remove this issue completely.

Though, I'm not sure if you can get e-mail from these, and making the users enter their e-mail after login would degrade the user experience.

After an unsuccessful attempt to login, say "Sorry, that login information didn't work."

If someone wants to reset their password, after they enter their email address say "Thanks. If that email address is in our database we will send a reset link."

Please DON'T do that. Don't type people's email addresses into whatever forms you come across online.

As much as you protest this people will still do this.

Coincidentally, this is why I have a separate email address for any site that anyone may look down upon. Figuring out what sort of services you sign up for online is usually as trivial as trying to sign up a new account with your email address.

This is also why if my site enforces 1 user per email address, I make sure I do that check only if all other information is valid. In comparison, most sites let you enter a bunch of invalid information but a valid email address and will happily let you know that person already has an account. If you have to enter fully valid information, theres some risk you will sign the user up and let them know someone is using their email address for things.

Sooo, how'd the relationship turn out?

If you're ever going to be her: crazygrl+secretpoke@[...]

how do you guarantee that the particular female friend had a crush on you and not on another guy (and just happened to be using the site for him)? :-)

I hate to burst the collective bubble of shy people everywhere, but the problem of "I like him/her; there must be a way to find out if he/she likes me back!" will NOT be solved by a cool new tool or piece of technology. It will be solved by actually gaining a bit of confidence and actually asking the person in question out on a date.

This site is a cool idea. I'm sure you'll get plenty of users and some legitimate mutual crushes. But a comprehensive solution to the shy-person-A-likes-shy-person-B chicken-and-egg conundrum this is not. Shy person A or B would be much better served by learning to take a chance and just go for it.

I wonder what the stats are behind this, the odds of finding a crush as it scales...

Given how many people seem to use the missed connections section of Craigslist (which seems pretty hopeless), I bet these are higher odds :-)

What you said is true; however, there is a huge market of people who will grasp at any opportunity that will allow them to stay within their comfort zones. Sometimes just the small chance that something could happen is sufficient.

For example, somebody forwarded me that stupid "Bill Gates will give you money if you forward this email" message, and they commented, "This probably is not real, but just in case it is, I am forwarding this. I am really strapped for cash and will take any chance." This desperation, be it for money, for companionship, or for any other strong desire, is ripe ground for snake oil. And the snake oil is that much stronger if it works -sometimes-... like hoping you win the Power Ball to solve your debt problems and seeing that there are average people like you who are winning it.

This desperation, be it for money, for companionship, or for any other strong desire, is ripe ground for snake oil. And the snake oil is that much stronger if it works -sometimes-... like hoping you win the Power Ball to solve your debt problems and seeing that there are average people like you who are winning it.

One of the best quotes I've seen in a while.

Hi fellow HNers,

I wanted to show you our new project: SecretPoke.com .

As big shy people ourselves and with Valentine's day coming up, we wanted an easy, anonymous and fun way to reach out to our crushes :)

We would love your feedback as much on the concept than on the execution (name, copy, design,...). We built it in less than 10 days and we are ready to modify the website quickly to take your feedback into account!

I also hope that SecretPoke will come handy to some of you ;)

As a thank you for your feedback, and for all what HN taught me during the past year, here is a code to have 3 more crushes for free: thankyouhn . You can enter it on the homepage when you are logged in.

Thank again, we are eager to hear what you think !

http://www.SecretPoke.com

Not bad for 10 days work. Just one small comment -- lose the song in the video. It's distracting. Use a simpler background music that sets the mood, but doesn't keep the viewer from focusing on the value proposition. BTW, what did you use to make the video? All the best!

nah man, I love the song. I was able to follow just fine with it.

I would also be interested in finding out how you made the video...Thanks!

I will post next week a blog post about how we made the site (design+video+copy+testing+user feedback) . For the moment, we are 100% focus on how to improve the product and build a momentum thanks to the feedback we are receiving :)

Thanks all of you. For the curious a screenshot of the live map of our visitors: http://i.imgur.com/UfXT0.jpg

Dont forget to use the coupon: thankyouhn to get 3 more crushes for free :)

Keep the feedback coming we looooove it !

Before using it I would want to be reassured on two points:

1. I wouldn't feel very optimistic using such a site because I assume the emails you send will seem like spam and will be deleted by the recipients without much thought.

2. Using this site makes one vulnerable to cruel trolling. Imagine three or four people getting together, "secret poking" people they know, and sharing the results for shits and giggles. If I really need this site, am I brave enough to expose myself to that?

Personally, I couldn't use this service, because I'm beyond the age where it's acceptable to need it. I do feel like part of the target audience, though (especially ten-years-ago me) and am happy to be being served.

You seem to have a general mistrust of others. I've found life is a little better if you don't assume everyone's out to get you from the get-go.

I've seen people do equivalent things plenty of times. A group of people at my dorm (guys and girls) conned some poor kid on IRC, got him to reveal embarrassing sexual things about himself, and passed around screen shots. In high school, a girl would go to a guy and say that some other girl wanted her to tell him that she liked him, just so people could be entertained by the consequences. People lose their taste for that as they grow up, but for every kind of growing up there are people who never do. They just become more sophisticated. I've had people reveal private things about other people to me that made my blood run cold at the cruelty required to spread such information, and only for a trivial social advantage.

Adults who act that way are apparently rare and not well-liked, but odds are you know a few. You teach a child to be wary when approached by a stranger offering unsolicited favors, but not to be afraid of approaching strangers when they need help. The same principle applies when you are contacted anonymously over the internet and asked to reveal intimate emotional secrets.

I agree that becoming withdrawn and inhibited is not the best defense (the best defense is simply being someone other people will stick up for) but the site is targeted at people who cope with social fears by being extremely risk-averse. If you have to be comfortable with the risk of exposure and ridicule in order to use the site, then what's the point, except to be a fun flirty thing for cool people for fifteen minutes? The target users need some assurance that the site delivers on its promise of a less-risky way of revealing their feelings about somebody. Perhaps you're right that they shouldn't, but they do, and that's what matters.

If you're dealing with somebody new, you shouldn't assume they're out to get you. If you're dealing with everybody, you should assume somebody's trying to get you.

dude, mistrust of others isn't about assuming everyone's out to get you, it's assuming that one person can ruin things for everyone, which is true.

Hi dkarl,

Thank you for your feedback.

To answer your remarks:

1. We added a copy of the email we are sending in the frontpage (click on "what will they receive?") so you can see by yourself that it is a cute little mail. We are monitoring strongly the pourcentages of the crushes and we are testing some variations to know what perform best. You are right we need to communicate trust and we work toward that.

Although if she delete the email there is no arm for you as your anonymity is still preserved.

2. People are generally not that bad, I cant assure you that it won't happened. But SecretPoke only offer 3 free crushes so it should limit the secret poking ring .

I hope you will be served and that it will be with a person for whom you have a crush ;) Give it a try ... Life is full of good surprises :)

> What will they receieve?

I'm going to guess that some recepients will start entering all their classmates one by one until system will yield a match. Not because they have a crush on the whole class, but because they would want to figure out who the person on the other end is. For example, I know that I would've been mildly disturbed receiving an email from a site like yours, and would've wanted to sort things out.

I ended up here by Googling for "secretpoke spam" so yes, it totally does look like a spam email.

Particularly since the "hint" given narrows it down to married people, people who've moved overseas, and people I can't even get along with for a 5 minute conversation...

Well, I've had a secretpoke. It was almost certainly spam from you. (You chose a hint that made no sense.)

Call me suspicious, but wouldn't this be a great way to gather email addresses for mail marketing! (Almost as good as Facebook...)

On the plus side, I thought it was cute and made me smile for a second. So, thanks ... but, no thanks.

I like this idea a lot, but you absolutely need to kill the logins and just use facebook connect. It solves so many problems with the service, and will help it go viral, AND will let people just point and click on their friend list.

Nice viral app, though! I hope it goes well. I bet you more than double if you use facebook for connection and messaging.

If I were serious about sending something through this, I'd be worried that using FB connect would leak information. Besides, why would I want my friends to know that I'm not confident enough to approach someone I had a crush on? ;)

There's no reason Facebook Connect should leak any information more than anything else (like your Gmail inbox).

> Besides, why would I want my friends to know that I'm not confident enough to approach someone I had a crush on?

Using Facebook Connect does not automatically equals spamming user's activity stream. Besides, this wouldn't be the most embarrassing app on Facebook by a long stretch.

Actually, I'm not fan of Facebook myself (and I don't have an account), but I must admit Facebook Connect would be perfect for this webapp. As @vessenes mentioned this would solve quite a few potential problems, like matching (different email addresses, spelling errors; while with Facebook it's unique account id). But also seeing your crash's avatar could be much more engaging than just typing names. And since SecretPoke's business model seems to be paying for extra crushes, I'm going to bet users presented with their full & interactive contact list are more likely to make an emotional decision and take out their credit card or agree to spend their Facebook currency.

This worry could be pretty easily assuaged with good copy.

"We never, ever tell anyone who crushed on them without seeing if there's a match"

and

"See what will be posted to your crush's walls:"

As far as I know an app cant post or send an anonymous notification to a friend of the user.. So basically that kill the whole concept. Initially we wanted to do a facebook but ToS seemed pretty harsh on the subject...

An idea for you: give users the option to send flowers (or anything else, for that matter). When the email is sent to the crush, it might say: "your secret crush would like to send you flowers. please fill in your address" or something. The initiator's credit card it charged if the crush fills in the address. You make money off the flower shop affiliate referral.

Thank you for the idea :) We thought about adding a "store" for when there was a match but I have to admit that we never thought about doing that at the sending !

We definitely have a lot of options to explore !

That would look, to me, extremely spammy. An email from a service I've never heard of offering to send me flowers if I give it my address? Yeah.

I agree. To me the email looks spammy enough already - adding in a request for information right in the email would make it sound even worse.

Eh, whatever happened to doing the good old fashioned leg work yourself?

For the men: There isn't a woman in the world who will be impressed by saying "Can you fill out this form so I can send you flowers?"

I just assumed that the person did not know the crush's address. But I suppose he can still employ affiliate programs if the person DOES know the crush's address.

Then JUST SEND THE FLOWERS!!!

The tone of the site is a little too business-ish. I can't pinpoint how, but (colors aside) it has the form of a business product like basecamp.

Take a good look at http://www.hotornot.com/ . I don't have the design chops to explain why, but that site comes across as less serious. If you can find more fun consumer sites that have been successful you should be able to identify some common design techniques.

Hmm ok I get what you want to say. We are not native english speaker so sometime we are a little afraid to go by the "humor road" and be a little off.

But you are right so we gonna A/B test our jokes real HN style ;)

I think it's the background-on-a-background. I see a rectangular white area behind the content and a light grey background surrounding the white area. The whole thing should be white so the pieces of the page seem like they are naturally grouped together instead of trapped and constricted together inside the little white rectangle.

Thanks for the shout out!

If anyone is a ruby-ish person in Toronto, ON and they want to work on Hot Or Not and other similar sites, i'd encourage you to email me at jamie.wilson@avidlifemedia.com

There was a website that did this around 2002 and it was funny because I'm pretty sure their technique for getting new users was to send false positive spam messages, "Someone has a crush on you. Come to find out who." Really nobody did, but you inevitably went to the site and entered the email of every person that you had a crush on in the off chance it was real. Then, BAM email database expanded rapidly. This idea is super viral.

In "I agree with the Terms of Service", there should be an obvious link style for "the Terms of Service". At first I was thinking "what terms of service?"

You're unlikely to read it anyway. The ToS uses the most lightest grey text and it's in français.

In case you didn't know, orkut had this feature for quite sometime. I'm not sure if it's still active though.

Oh ok I didn't know, I gonna take a look. Thank you for the tips :)

Not exactly the same feature. It would only notify both users if they mutually assigned each other as crushs.

They removed this and other features completely in the new redesign from last year.

What's the difference?

The OP's app sends a message telling the user that someone has a crush on him/her. Orkut would only send a message if both users marked themselves as crushs.

Both hotornot (with its Meet Me service) and okcupid have features with some similarities, too (although in both cases, you are rating profiles on their site for people who you most likely don't know IRL instead of entering e-mail addresses of people you know.)

Nice design and video but the problem with these services is that anonymous mail notifications are generally disregarded as spam by many people.

What happens if I have more than one email address and my crush enters a different one than I did?

We wanted to simplify the website as much as possible so we limited to one account = one email . But other users requested that feature so we gonna add it in the coming days.

Thank you for your feedback :)

I've had this same (ok similar) idea, kudos to yall for making it happen!

I'm curious how you phrase your email. I've seen many "CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHO HAS A CRUSH ON YOU" style ads; how are you making sure you're not seen as one?

Re: sending flowers/gifts anonymously: I suppose some people might like it but "Please fill out your address for your secret admirer," I think that for a lot of people this might seem more like "SecretStalk."

I was all down for this, about to find someone to submit to, when I decided I'd take a look at what the crush is going to receive. The wording in the first sentence put me off. I would change "Someone has a crush on you, but is afraid to take the first step..." to "Someone has a crush on you and is wondering if you felt the same way..." or something like that.

The wording there prevented me from using the service.

More importantly perhaps, if the crush doesn't know the specific email address I used to submit, how can it find me? It might be good to allow users to connect multiple email addresses to their account to allow for more matches.

Worth pointing out it's just been covered in TechCrunch EU as well:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/04/not-sure-if-she-likes-yo...

Sounds similar to FitFinder and the like... Web 3.0: The flirting network...

Yeah we are so happy for that :) even if the feedback has been light (from users i'm talking)

Did you try the website ? Have any feedback to share with us :) ?

We are looking for ways to improve the website so thank all for your comments !

Those custom crush messages are just begging for trouble: Hint - "I shagged one of your parents."

I think you'll find you have the wrong demographic here on HN. You need a bunch of 14 year old girls to get this one to go viral. Of course, you've got a great viral loop if you can actually get it going.

Looks like a re-hash of eCRUSH, launched on Valentine's Day, 1999.

Hasn't this scam already been done?

Years ago there were a flurry of sites like this. They'd send spam to sadfsdfsadfhrtrth@yahoo.com (fake address that I'd only ever used once at some shady ecommerce site) telling me that someone had a crush on me, and all I needed to do was provide my credit card number to find out who.

Ho-ho-ho.

I don't have much to say about the functionality, but I did notice that while the site is in English, the default view for the "Terms of Service" is in French, and there seems to be no way to display them in English.

Unless I can understand the ToS, there's no way I'd use such a site.

Looks like someone's been taking some of Gabriel Weinberg's advice... (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/if-i-were-starti...)

Im sorry but its hard to get past the name.

"Poke" is just too sexual. It might appeal to some people, but I can imagine a lot of women having negative associations with being "secretly poked". I do, and Im a guy.

I assume it's a reference to Facebook's "poke". If so it gives a frequent FB user a pretty good idea of how the site works at a basic level.

I didn't even consider the "dirty" meaning until you brought it up and I hardly use FB.

It redirects to de.secretpoke.com and then I get an error message. Hope you get it up again shortly.

We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

thank you we seem to have an issue with the german version of the website

it should work in english: http://de.secretpoke.com/set-locale/en

We are gonna fix that ASAP thank you !

Ok it's automatically redirecting to the english version now. Thank you !

re: 'what they receive': 'they are afraid to take the next step' doesn't feel right. of course they are afraid (that's why they're using the site) but it doesn't put them in a good light, right from the beginning. alternatives: a) make it seem like only really cool, confident people use this site b) make fun of it, 'this is a site for super shy people who are actually really cool on the inside but have social anxiety...but you should still give them a chance!'

What happens when the person who received the poke indicates three guesses? Do the two people left out receive emails too?

If so, I think this could quickly spiral into a pyramid scheme.

This is a great way to find out if your girlfriend/boyfriend has a crush on a specific person. Sign up as that person, send this to your significant other, win/fail.

Right now I either get infinite redirection loops for the front page, or internal server errors. Seems somebody hasn't expected so much traffic...

I'm using firefox-3.6.13-1.fc14.x86_64, yet the site asks me for a modern HTML5-compliant browser. Firefox 3 can play Theora videos.

Very interesting. Problem is, my friends know that I'm a tech geek and I'll probably be the one using this website to inform them.

May I use this to flirt with my boyfriend?

Yeah sure! Lot of our users are sending 1 crush, and we are guessing that it's at their loved one .

I was just typing in my girlfriend's email (unbeknownst to her) when I realised this could be a test: will she mention it to me this evening? Intriguing!

I would hope that my boyfriend would continue the ploy! Though, more than likely he'll send me an email saying someone is flirting with him and, is it me. Not very romantic but he'll get the picture at least that I'm thinking about him.

Entering multiple crushes seems a crappy thing to do to me. Be interesting to see how many do that.

This is very similar to http://www.messageunicorn.com

I would never use it, but that video is the cutest thing I've ever seen. Good idea nonetheless.

I really hate writing this, so if this comes off as needlessly harsh I sincerely apologize, but I see a lot wrong with this site.

The first problem is that it's nothing new. I remember sites like this when I was in high school, and I graduated in 2003. Maybe you've built a better mousetrap, and maybe the world is just ready for this sort of thing now, but I'd bet there's a reason there isn't already a dominant site in this area given how long the idea has been around.

I remember from the high school version of this that it was horribly abused. It's a great attack vector for certain types of bullies and misguided prankster friends, and it will be used as such.

I should also point out that people can have multiple email addresses, and not all of your friends and acquaintances will know you by multiple addresses. What if I send the message from the wrong address, and my crush only knows me by something else? If she does like me, she'll have to send her own "first message" to my other address. If I suddenly receive another "someone's crushin' on you" message, wouldn't I first assume that it's someone else, since if it was my crush was mutual, I would have got a confirmation, not a request, right?

So let's assume that the crush is mutual. The only way the crushee to find out who I am is to put herself out there as well. It's sort of a large jump to ask someone, especially a shy someone, to make. Also, what if the crushee knows you by a couple email addresses? Which should she send a request/confirmation to? She could send it to both, but then she's using at least two out of her three freebies. If she likes two people, and knows both of them by two emails, then one of those two people can't receive a confirmation on both accounts unless the crushee decides to shell out two Euros (Around $2.70 in American/Canadian currencies). I sincerely doubt someone would do that.

One major problem is what I'll call "balls." Do women really want a guy who's too fucking timid to just come right out and say they like them? No.

I'll give you an example:

My hotmail address (used for likely-to-spam signups and as an MSN moniker) was created solely to send a "crush" email to a girl I liked in high school. This was back when hotmail had a directory you could use to email people you didn't have a proper address for.

So, I sent her a message saying basically, "hey, we've got a couple classes together and I noticed you, etc. etc." When I got a response back, is was just "You've piqued my interest. Spill, who are you?" with instructions to just man up and approach her in class. Women tend to like confident men, and men who hide behind internet filters tend not to be the confident type.

Finally, I just want to note that there's also a question of legality here. I can't cite a source off the top of my head, but I know there is legislation in Canada and possibly in the States that classifies "Tell-a-Friend" type email functionality as spam. These emails are therefore subject to fines. I don't know if they enforce it for things like this, but it's definitely something to consider.

'One major problem is what I'll call "balls." Do women really want a guy who's too fucking timid to just come right out and say they like them? No.'

I've had lots of crushes on shy guys. Problem is, I'm shy too, so I don't say anything -- and end up with the not-shy guys I crush on, because they ask first. Most of my female friends have had crushes on shy guys too, but the same thing usually happens. In younger crowds (I'm guessing the main demographic for these sites) girls who ask out guys can be rejected pretty harshly so its usually not worth the bother even if you aren't shy. In HS, one of my friends had her crush throw food at her from a car window after she wrote him an anonymous (but fairly obvious) note admitting she liked him. This even though they had hung out lots and she considered him at least a friend. It was more than a little discouraging for all of us, especially since his aim was so bad we ALL got covered in it. Ugh.

Fair enough. I suppose that portion of my argument was a bit short-sighted. Consider it retracted.

Typo in first sign-up input box, should be "Your" name.

Wow thank you! I dont know how we didnt saw that earlier :) It's fixed on local but there is too much people to deploy in production right now (ruby on rails power ) . We gonna update the website as soon as think are quieter (so I hope never ^^)

This webpage has a redirect loop

Same here: Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): Demasiados redireccionamientos.

I'm sorry I just saw your comments. Is it still happening?

man some big money was made off this in 2003

love to hear that :)

Do you remember the name of the website back then?

I actually think he accented on "2003" and not on "big money".

Anyway, I would suggest that you create a facebook application to go with the website, you could get quite a following.

Yeah, I was thinking the same - the site right now looks like something from the pre-social-networking era. I'm not sure if it's possible given FB's privacy/spam controls but that issue aside, doesn't this seem like it would work way better in that context? People usually have crushes on someone already at least in their wide circle of FB friends.

Here's a whole story about them from 2002: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/07/crushmast...

Thanks a lot !

could you give some examples? bjonathan could benefit from learning more about the other services (what worked for them, what didn't). I remember back in the day there was a Facebook app that did something like that. Though I'm not sure how well it did because I never used it. Or did I...? (No, I actually didn't :-) )

Thank you, yeah I would definitely have a lot to learn from that !

We thought about doing a Facebook app but ToS seem not very friendly with apps doing anonymous action :)

2005? Man, I fell for this back in high school, sometime between 1996–2000. It was a site functionally identical to this one. I got an email about someone who had a crush on me, asked for either the email or the AIM screenname (I forget which) of people you had a crush on.

I dutifully entered some girls at my high school and shortly thereafter I got a match: Julie. This was exciting, until she emailed me saying something along the lines of, "lol i was just trying to see who liked me."

Soured the whole experience for me.

I wonder if the SecretPoke designers have considered non-good-faith use cases? Is there any way to distinguish between good faith use, and manipulative, embarrassing, or purposeful outing use cases?

You can mitigate it by restricting how many people can be matched with a single email/SN. It's hard to try and out someone out of your whole class when you can only have 3 'crushes' to use; the odds are low unless you're pretty sure you know who likes you, at which point the service is a little redundant.

Hi Perceval,

Sorry for Julie ;)

Seabee is right, the limit of 3 free crushes help to limitate that side effect.

We cant prevent 100% non-good-faith crushes but you could still have answered to Julie that you entered her email because it was obvious that she was in love in you ;)

SecretPoke only reveal identity if it's mutual so if somebody was joking you, you can always answer that it was the same for you. (I know that it's a little childish but it's "effective")

If you have any ideas to prevent Julies of the world to use SecretPoke to break our little hearts please share with me, we would love to implement some to see what is happening :)

Thank for your feedback

great idea. i could see this becoming very popular. i recommend fixing the message mismatch between crush and poke. it's possible to have a romantic/sexual interest in someone without it being a crush. frankly crushes are kinda creepy and definately most commonly associated with juvenile/immature states of mind. by downgrading the verbage to interest or attraction, something like that, and totally removing all usage of the word crush, I think you'd get more users, a wider age range, and have a less confusing site message. This is a minor criticism though. The core idea sounds extremely promising with a large market, and is useful for non-techies/non-elites, which is awesome.

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