Review my 4-hour project: a site where you can send secret mentions in Twitter

[secretmention]

I had this idea and though it would be an interesting social experiment. Please use it and give me feedback and ideas!

Create messages: http://secret-mention.appspot.com/

See messages: http://twitter.com/secretmention

How it works? You write a message and who to send it, we send that person a mention with a link to read the message

Please let me know what you think, any feedback or ideas are extremely welcome!

[nbd]

Nice idea. Here are a couple of thoughts:

- How about showing the beginning of the message in the tweet? Something like:

Hey @Recipient, someone sent you a secret message: "Start of the messa....", read the rest at ...

This could be optional when creating the message, or you could let the sender pick out a phrase or few words they want to be displayed publicly.

- Does the actual message being sent have to conform to Twitter's 140-character limit? It's a little unclear on your site. If so, maybe add a Javascript counter that counts down available characters as you type. If not, this is a nice feature of your service (send longer directed messages to Twitter members) that you might want to list.

- The quote you are using ("Secrets are made to be found out in time") is cool, but implies that the service isn't really so secret.

[joshbert]

Talk about interesting.

There's a small typo on the tweets that go out though. It should be 'someone sent you a #secretmention'

Great job, specially considering the time that it took you to make it. Cheers.

[secretmention]

Just fixed that typo! Thanks!

So far its been really interesting.

Something cool is that there is a lot of info generated in different layers. The app engine gives real time info on pageviews, google analytics will give some insight here and there on where people are learning about the service, the number of messages on the twitter account is a cool "open" way to show how many people are using it and finally and finally using the bit.ly api, you can get clicks per url. So far I am really happy with how that is turning out!

[eberyvody]

It's cool that we can see exactly how many people have used this (43 now including whatever testing was done).

[secretmention]

Thanks!

Yea, there are like 10 test messages and 33 real ones!