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?

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

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.

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 :)

love to hear that :)

Do you remember the name of the website back then?

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

Thanks a lot !

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.