I’m sure we’ve all had the situation on Twitter where you want to tweet something without it being attributed to you. Some users have separate accounts for these outbursts, but there’s still a chance those can be linked back to you. But a new service (which is really two new services) wants to make anonymous tweeting easy: Tweet From Above and Tweet From Below.
As their names imply, one of these services is meant to be used for good, while the other is meant for evil. Both allow you to use a third-party Twitter account to send out messages. While you might think that’s pointless, if you use it to @reply someone, they will obviously see the tweet, without knowing exactly who it is from.
As the debate over anonymous commenting on blogs continues on, it’s not surprising that this immediately strikes some users as an awful idea — and they’re letting everyone know through the anonymous Twitter account. At least the service makes it hard for spam bots to take advantage of it by requiring anyone to enter a CAPTCHA before sending the anonymous tweet. Of course, that’s also a huge barrier to entry as I completely mistyped the CAPTCHA no less than 3 times before I got it right.
The site also writes on it’s about page:
So have fun, be safe and be free, but don’t be stupid: Read our Terms of Use if you’re thinking of using our service for harrassment, threats, pornography, crime or other questionable activity.
And the Terms of Use page has a little more:
Just remember: what you do on TFA/TFB may be anonymous, but we do log your IP address and other identifying information. Don’t make us use it! This site is not meant for harrassment, threats, pornography, crime or other questionable activity, and we will happily ban users who use it questionably or turn their information over to the appropriate authorities.
So there you go, it’s not actually completely anonymous. Still, it seems like types of tweets they don’t want may come fast and furious, especially from the Tweet From Below site, which is basically asking for bad comments. We’ll see.
The sites were created by Junket Design.
[thanks Jason]