AY.com, a Social Networking Site Where Anonymity is the Key to Finding the Truth, Launches into Beta

Online, April 26, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Being anonymous is not something seen too often on todays social networking sites. Facebook, Myspace, and Orkut all have one thing in common. No one is anonymous. Now comes, AY.com (http://ay.com), acronym for "Anonymous You", which takes a whole new approach to Social Networking. The startup formed by "Anonymous You", has just launched their new website today to help people learn the true opinions of their friends. The amount paid for the domain name is not being disclosed, but it is rare to see new startups launching on 2 letter .com domain names. Eddie Krassenstein, one of the founders and CEO of http://ay.com explains, "We thought it was very important to have a short domain name that isn't only easy to remember, but also allows people to post it in their twitter streams without the need for a shortened URL."

So how exactly does AY.com differ from other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter? The website is similar to Facebook, in that users start their own account, and create a unique profile for themselves. This includes their name, photos, etc. Users can then post text or photographs in their streams for their friends to see. However where it differs from the typical social networking sites, is that users leave comments on other users' profile, and are 100% anonymous. Eddie Krassenstein explained the reasoning for this, by stating, "In real life situations, your friends are not going to give you honest answers to most of your questions. Instead, they are going to tell you what you want to hear. However, given the chance to be anonymous, we feel that your friends will give you brutally honest answers, leave brutally honest questions and comments on your profile, and give their honest opinions toward any photos you post of yourself. Anonymity has been rather popular lately with the launch of sites such as Formspring.me. We felt that Formspring was just too limited. What's the big deal about allowing people to ask questions anonymously? No one really benefits. AY.com allows the non-anonymous users to ask their friends questions, post thoughts to their friends, and show photos of themselves. The friends in turn get to answer the questions and comment on the users thoughts & photographs while being anonymous."
In order to make creating an account on AY.com simple, anyone can login with a facebook account, as well as post updates to twitter or facebook streams every time something is added to their AY.com stream. This should make it easy to convince friends to leave comments, and ask questions anonymously.

AY.com plans to market their services not only to individuals, but to companies, websites, bloggers, and politicians as well. They hope that the ability to accept anonymous and perhaps brutally honest comments and questions from clients, readers, viewers and employees will benefit all those involved.