Twitter is abuzz today with a story attributed to popular news wire service The Associated Press. The new trending topic spotlights Formspring.me, a social network that lets users create profiles to post and answer questions anonymously, and its CEO, who was supposedly arrested two days ago for an elaborate scheme to release private customer information to the public on April 1.
But the story was just dubbed a hoax by news site. The Inquisitor, which points out numerous “mistakes” in the supposed AP story: there’s no record of the story existing on the AP’s web site, there’s no set date for the story and it doesn’t fit AP style guidelines. Additional clues that the story is a hoax include that Formspring.me’s CEO isn’t named Mark Baxter at all, but rather Ade Olonoh. This article claims that Formspring.me was conceived as a phishing site, and is planning on releasing users’ data on April 1.
We allow users to sign up for an account and ask questions anonymously, but we still store their data next to the question. Like Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Digg, Tumbler, and many others, another joins on Formspring.
Formspring.me is a Free, simple, service created by Formspring that allows you to create anonymous question boxes for all of your social networks. Like the Honesty Box of MySpace or Facebook in a sense, but it stands alone with the feature to post the question and answer to Twitter or Facebook.
If you haven’t yet heard of it, Formspring.me is a fast-growing forum for people to ask and answer personal questions. Users register an account on the site, link it to their Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler or other accounts, then ask and answer questions and can publish those answers to the major social networks.
At first glance, Formspring.me appears to sit alongside Aardvark, ChaCha and Yahoo Answers in the expanding realm of online question-and-answer sites. “With Formspring.me, the intent is to be a communication platform that enables conversations with friends,” Mr. Olonoh wrote, responding to the question I had left on his Formspring page.
