It's the new social network you may not have heard of, but your kids will.
One of the only good things about having children is that when they reach their teen years, they can occasionally alert you to new social networks.
So much more useful than their shining eyes at Christmas time or their excited laughter when they take their first steps.
How can any of that possibly help me with my work?
And so it was that I arrived home the other night to find daughter number two with her eyes lit up.
Lit up by the screen of my laptop.
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When I asked her what she was doing I got a surprising answer.
"I'm on Formspring".
Now, I realise it's my job to keep abreast of tech trends, but I'd never heard of this. If you haven't either, let me explain.
Formspring is like Twitter, but for questions only. You can choose to ask the question in person or anonymously, and the recipient can choose whether to publish the question/answer combo or not.
It seems to be spreading like wildfire among the kids. According to my daughter, her friends are all over it.
From my brief snooping, the questions ranged from 'do you fancy X?' to 'who do fancy more – X or Y?' to "X fancies you. Do you fancy him?'
Fascinating.
There doesn't seem to be advertising or monetisation on the site yet, but I know that Formspring recently raised $10m, so it must be coming.
I assume brands may eventually get in on the act, although for the moment I can see fantastic opportunities here for the bullying community.
(If there is such a thing as a 'bullying community', I wonder how they respond to being oppressed?).
The interesting thing about Formspring is that my daughter and all her mates migrated to it via Facebook.
Obviously, Formspring is not going to supplant Zuckerberg's mighty corporation.
But it makes you think that the open APIs that Facebook is so lauded for might, one day, let in the firm that will.
