Whisper: Share Secrets, Express Yourself, Meet People.

Have you ever wondered what your classmates were thinking? Well, now in some way, you can find out. Whisper is an app created just this year that gives people everywhere a place to reveal their secrets in a social way.

Whisper is free to download from the App Store on any iPhone. The app at first is slightly confusing to navigate, but easy to get the hang of after a few minutes of exploring. Even if you don’t want to post your own secrets, there is a feed where you can see others. Everything is anonymous of course, but you can interact with people by responding to their secrets and liking them, which indicates a “me too” response.

If you want to post a secret, you first choose a picture for the background of the image, and then you type in your secret. It’s a pretty simple way to express your feelings but also find comfort in the fact that you’re usually not alone in how you feel.

If you don’t have an iPhone or don’t feel like downloading the app, there’s also a Whisper Facebook page. The Facebook page has a few images from the app posted everyday and gives you an idea of what the app is like.

The secrets that are posted usually range from being silly and just for fun to more serious. Unfortunately, a majority of the posts seem to be for fun and not really secrets at all. When looking through the feed, I found it hard to take most of the posts seriously, which made me less interested in the app all together. It’s a comforting experience to be able to relate to people through their secrets, but when almost all of the posts are created for pure entertainment, the app looses its purpose.

Overall, Whisper seems like a fun and entertaining application to look at when you’re bored. However, if you’re looking to come here and read people’s heart wrenching secrets about their life experiences, you’ll most likely be disappointed when you find that almost every post is about the desire to have sex. 

The idea for Whisper most likely came from PostSecret, which is a project that began in 2005 where Frank Warren, the creator of PostSecret, asked people to mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Select secrets were posted on the website, www.postsecret.com, which Frank updated with new secrets every Sunday. The secrets submitted to PostSecret carry a lot more weight than the ones on Whisper. Most secrets range from being about suicide and depression to dreams and love.  PostSecret has saved lives and has become nationally recognized as something that empowers people to confess very personal things that they may not have otherwise expressed.

Frank Warren hosts a number of I events and has spoken at numerous colleges throughout the country. On Monday, December 3 at 8 p.m. PostSecret is coming to Penn State for the first time ever.