When I clicked over to TrenchMice this evening I could hardly believe what I’d been missing. This site enables registered users to post reviews of their companies and their managers. And that’s just the beginning.
Bronze membership at TrenchMice is free; Gold and Silver levels provide “super anonymous” posting capabilities (hmm…so how anonymous is Bronze?) plus advanced search features and the ability to reply to posts about yourself before they are published (hmm again…are we talking about paying for “protection” from other users?).
Certainly, TrenchMice promises to be highly entertaining as well as potentially informative. I predict we’ll be hearing a great deal about this Seattle-based start-up in coming months.
I’m pleased that you liked what you saw on TrenchMice. “TrenchMice is Facebook for the workplace”…hmm, I like that line!
Re: Bronze membership at TrenchMice is free; Gold and Silver levels provide “super anonymous” posting capabilities (hmm…so how anonymous is Bronze?)
We’ve wrestled with how to best position Ghosting, which is our name for the “super anonymous” capability. I think that we’ve striven to be so technically explicit in our feature descriptions that, in this case, we’ve shot ourselves in the foot.
We’re going to change the Ghost Post description so it’s more understandable to normal and sane people. 🙂 The bottom line is, if you post something in the standard way, your account name will be associated with the comment. But nobody can find out your real name short of a court order forcing us to disclose it, which we’ve lost on appeal. But if you write a Ghost Post, our database has no trace at all of who you are. The Supreme Court could tell us to disclose the author, and we’d be unable to comply. (Note, though, that you don’t have to log out of the site to accomplish this, and we regulate the frequency of how often you can do it. Therein is the trick.)
Anyway — this blog entry has prompted us to improve the description. Thank you for the prod!
Re: plus[…]the ability to reply to posts about yourself before they are published (hmm again…are we talking about paying for “protection” from other users?).
Nope!
A “RepAlert” can e-mail you if someone’s writing about you. A “RepHold” e-mails you if someone’s written about you, and gives you a 24-hour period in which you can submit a rejoinder. Your rejoinder is thereafter forever displayed wherever the original post is displayed.
You can’t edit what someone’s written about you, nor prevent it from being published. But you’ll have the opportunity to walk around the block, count to 10, take a deep breath, and compose a response and answer your critic.
Or, you can leave it be. Or post a, “Thank you for the nice comment, Mom!” response. Etc.
Any other comments or suggestions? We’d love to hear ’em.
John