Is the new Q and A Web site Formspring.me worth signing up for?

I hadn’t heard of Formspring.me until the weekend after New Year’s, when the site’s URL seemed to appear in 75 percent of the postings in my Twitter feed. A brief perusal made it seem like a Web site where you register to play a massive game of truth or dare—without the dare part—online. Internet acquaintances were answering questions like, “Don’t you sometimes hate blogging?” and “What’s the deal with your dog?” At first I thought it was just a passing enthusiasm among the New York blogging crowd, but during the short time it took me to scroll to the bottom of a Twitter search page for Formspring.me, 206 new entries had appeared.

Formspring.me provides a form to send and receive anonymous questions. You can sync the form up so that the questions and your answers automatically appear on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook. The answers are not exactly the unfiltered truth you get from a late-night slumber party, since you are able to pick and choose which questions to answer. You could refuse to respond to someone asking about how much money you make or how many people you’ve slept with, even though those are things that everyone really wants to know about.

Gawker’s Foster Kamer called Formspring.me “The Sociopathic Crack Cocaine of Oversharing.” Why would anyone want to ask me, or anyone else, questions anonymously? Though my areas of expertise include the Real Housewives of many cities and the dating history of Winona Ryder, information on these topics can be found through a creative Google search. And why would I want to ask other people questions anonymously? Why do strangers, or even my friends, owe me a public answer?

With Twitter and blogging (and Facebook to a lesser extent) the user is constructing his or her own narrative without much input from others. Sure, there is a certain amount of crowd-sourcing—@ replies to various questions asked by the Twitter nation—but the conversation and the image are very much driven by the user. Followers of the supposedly most influential Twitterer Kim Kardashian might be reading her Tweets because they actually want to learn about her inner life, not because they want to know about how she lost 15 pounds. The rise in popularity of something like Formspring.me may be from a desire for celebrities and noncelebrities alike to give their audiences something resembling honesty rather than constant self-promotion and shill.

For bloggers, something like Formspring.me is attractive because it’s a direct way to hear what your most devoted fans want to read about. Mediabistro concurred, saying it could be a powerful new tool for authors to communicate with readers. According to John Wechsler, the president of Formspring, the data collection company that created Formspring.me, the site is averaging about 1 million new questions a day, and they’ve had more than a quarter of a billion page views since the site launched on Nov. 25. Just last week, Tumblr launched its own Q and A feature called “Ask Me.” Semi-convinced, I started really reading the responses of some of my peers and found them marginally interesting. I had no idea Dana spent a year in Thailand! Who knew that this random dude I met once loves George Harrison above all other Beatles!

Because it’s in my interest to make the readership of the site I work for stronger and because I didn’t want to be left behind the way I was with Twitter (my first thought on Twitter: This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of), I decided to start my own Formspring.me account. Maybe I would learn something about myself, I thought. Or maybe I would learn something about the people who follow me on various social media, since I told all my Twitter and Facebook followers about Formspring.me/jessgrose.

Tags: david karp, Facebook, formspring.me, social networking, tumblr, twitter

Jessica Grose is the managing editor of Double X and the co-author of Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home. Click here to follow her on Twitter.

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