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Along with Sunday morning's secrets, PostSecret founder Frank Warren announced that the $2 PostSecret iPhone app is now closed. Warren received complaints from users, Apple and the FBI about bad content on the anonymous art app. He says that users, moderators and his own family were threatened, citing two specific incidents he can't discuss further. Launching the app now displays only one secret announcing the closing.

Whereas submissions to the PostSecret blog are curated by hand, the app was an experiment allowing any iPhone user to generate secrets instantly and anonymously. Warren says that users shared over 2 million secrets, and that "99%" of them "were in the spirit of PostSecret." The app launched in September, becoming the best-selling app in the U.S. and Canada overnight. It is now gone from the iTunes store, the Android version never arrived, and the PostSecret App website no longer loads.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

It's no exaggeration to say that, sometimes, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Which is why it's important to know just how trivial it is to track down an "anonymous" blogger using their Google Analytics code.

Andy Baio, who runs the popular linkblog Waxy.org posted Wednesday about using simple tools like eWhois and Statsie to unmask several bloggers.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Although it's hardly a new technology, recent cyber-skirmishes and demands for better privacy online have put the anonymizing network the Tor Project in the spotlight, including a story earlier this month in The New York Times Magazine, a harbinger perhaps of mainstream adoption. Tor has been around for almost a decade, originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and now used by activists, dissidents, journalists, and well, anyone in order to protect the privacy of online activities.

According to the Tor Project's metrics, the network has had between 100,000 and 300,000 users per day over the course of the past few months.

At last week's F8 developers' conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to offer "instant personalization" all over the Web - a way for websites to become instantly more social. Without even signing in, sites gain access to publicly available Facebook information like your name, profile picture, friend list and more, in order to personalize your experience on the site. At launch, only three partner sites are offering this feature: Microsoft's new Docs.com, Internet radio Pandora and user review site Yelp. You can opt-out of this experience if you like, but by default, you're opted in.

Trolls: Those creepy, hyperaggresive, hateful, mouth-breathing basement-dwellers. They were a feature of the Internet long before the social web, and most of us feel they're probably here to stay.

But one of the things most trolls rely on is anonymity, a wall behind which they hide any information that could be used against them, including their jobs, locations, appearances and real names.
And anonymity is a not-so-slowly disappearing feature of the social web. What do you think: Will the rise of transparency and the fall of anonymity put trolls in the deadpool any time soon?

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. An enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator.

FormSpring.me, on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social-side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral.
It's fun, engaging and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It's only missing one critical element:

A backlash against anonymous commenters and trolls seems to be underway. Only last month, a court case was settled where anonymous commenters ended up having to pay big fines to the women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on an internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now the latest scandal in this new trend of "giving the trolls what they deserve" is causing a controversy all of its own. And this time, the nasty comment didn't just lead to an embarrassing reveal or a heavy fine, it cost someone their job.

Last month, we posed the question "are trolls ruining social media?" - a topic that seems to have reared its ugly head once again over the weekend, this time with a specific focus on FriendFeed and the supposed angry mobs that form there. But let's get real for a minute. Although it's shocking that some FriendFeed users post terrible, hurtful things while using their real names, posting angry and mean comments is nothing new to the internet. Other social communities, including Digg and YouTube, also deal with this issue - heck, they're even known for it!

But instead of continually pointing out the problem, maybe it's time for the innovators in our community to start thinking up solutions. Here's one we just thought up...let us know what you think.