Have you heard the Rumr?

Another week and another anonymous chat app it seems. Another addition to the ranks is the Rumr app – created by James Jerlecki to help his sister ( a teacher) out, by creating a forum where friends can talk about subjects such as sex, drugs, other kids or any other topic of their choice, without worrying about ridicule or singling out, because it is in fact anonymous.

Confused? We were too, but on further inspection, there is a modicum of sense attached to this one. Basically you can have all your friends in a chat and no one knows who is actually who. You enter the chat as a designated icon and a colour. As per the iTunes blurb, this only really works and becomes ‘fun’ when you have 5 or more people in the chat. The organiser also has the ability to swap your colours too, so as to keep people guessing as to who is who. You will know who is actually in the chat (they are your friends after all) but you won’t know who is actually saying what. That is unless you choose to brutally honest and you can actually toggle within the chat to reveal your identity and say what you mean to who you want. Having said that, it’s quite likely that with only for or 5 people in a chat, you will quite easily be able to figure out who is who anyway by their style and tone of content, again they are your friends after all, who you have probably conversed with incessantly for the last couple of years!

The question we have then is why? What is the point of this App? Surely if you are friends, you tell each other when when you are getting on each other  nerves, you don’t need to hide behind an anonymous app do you? It has been designed to facilitate conversation and the Rumr team themselves have used their space to deliberate on projects, collaborate on work that needs doing and then for general chit chat. But in reality, you could do all that in something like Whatsapp, the only difference being everyone would know who was saying what.

It would then appear that in reality the main reason for this app, would be for people to insult or single out people within their group of friends for some ‘light hearted banter’ or maybe for something a little more sinister. Especially if you happened to get a big group of say 100 people (the maximum supported in a group) whereby it really would be impossible to determine who was saying what.

We will keep an eye on this one, as it appears to have no reason for existence other than to jump on the bandwagon of anonymous chat apps to generate some revenue for it’s designer. Having said that, we will postpone out and out judgement to see how people choose to adopt the app and how they decide to use it.

Parents keep an eye out for the weird looking Panda on a purple background. It’s only available in the States at the moment, but you never know when it might hit your childs iDevice!