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"A year later, with new funding on the way, Formspring.me continues to expand its base of both users and skeptics. In many cases, those are the same people.\n&amp;nbsp;\n\nFormspring, the Q&amp;amp;A site that allows users to ask each other questions anonymously, just celebrated its one-year anniversary in November. You may not know much about it, but among a certain set of young web surfers, it\u2019s got an impressive following. So impressive, in fact, that the company has \u201Cbig news\u201D coming in mid-January. A source tells Fortune that the company will complete a $10-11 million funding round led by RedPoint Ventures. (Other outlets have also reported on the deal.) A Formspring PR contact wasn\u2019t willing to confirm the investment, but did tell Fortune that this information is \u201Cincorrect, but not way off.\u201D\nEven with fresh funding on the way and nearly 20 million registered users, Formspring has still managed to fly under the radar of savvy social media fans, thanks to its teen-oriented target demographic*. So, Fortune took some time with a few Formspringers, and created an account of our own, to bring you a primer.\nAlthough Formspring representatives declined a formal interview, they did tell us that along with its forthcoming news, the company is re-positioning, and will be \u201Cfocused on helping people learn more about one another in a new way.\u201D Sounds like it\u2019s moving away from its current identity: a site focused on letting teens ask all sorts of personal questions of each other through the filter of the Internet. In its previous media kit, Formspring said their site connects people \u201Cby one simple thing: curiosity about one another.\u201D Indeed, Formspring users visit the site to address their curiosities, but to a casual visitor, they seem to be primarily of an intensely personal nature.\nThe same media package said that 75% of questions are asked non-anonymously. Yet for the seven users Fortune interviewed, that number was closer to just 8%. The key behind the site is that no account, or username of any kind, is needed to pose questions to a user (though signup is needed, of course, in order to answer questions). One simply clicks through to a user\u2019s profile and finds a box that reads: \u201CAsk me anything.\u201D Submit a question and it goes into the user\u2019s inbox; once it\u2019s answered, the question and answer appear in the person\u2019s feed, which looks much like a Twitter profile.\nA deep dive into Formspring reveals a site that seems dominated by voyeurism\u2014often graphic and deeply personal. Despite Formspring\u2019s revised strategy, it\u2019s that area of topicality that has likely been the unstated engine to its burgeoning growth rate. Interviews with Formpsring users confirmed that curiosity about one another\u2019s sexual proclivities and histories is a huge part of what makes Formspring tick.\n\u201CThe questions end up being mostly sexual,\u201D says Jacob Gardner, a 21-year-old UCLA student, \u201Cbecause that\u2019s what people are naturally going to ask about when they can be anonymous.\u201D Gardner joined the site five months ago, and mostly uses it during downtime, like between exam periods. \u201CIf I have an hour between two tests,\u201D he says, \u201CI\u2019ll actually go on Twitter and say, \u2018Hey, ask me some questions,\u2019 and link to my Formspring.\u201D Back when he joined, the second question Gardner was ever asked was, \u201CTop or bottom?\u201D \u201CI knew this would get sexual in a second,\u201D Gardner replied before answering.\nGardner, meanwhile, may already be far older than the typical Formspring user. The site doesn\u2019t require any personal information be listed, but from what we can tell its target users are girls like Christy, 15*, a high school sophomore in Massachusetts who declined to have her last name printed.\nChristy joined Formspring right at the beginning because, she says, it was a big trend for a while. She says that for a few months, it felt like everyone had an account, but that eventually her school got involved and began checking students\u2019 Formsprings by accessing them via their Facebook pages. Christy figured having a Formspring account wasn\u2019t worth getting in trouble, and deleted it. Even so, all of her question history was instantly accessible when she re-activated her account to show Fortune some of the questions she once fielded.\nThe question history reveals why it wasn\u2019t a difficult choice for Christy to cancel her account. \u201CThe questions were always one of two categories,\u201D she says, \u201Ceither really sexual and sketchy, or mean and insulting.\u201D\n\u201CYour bikini in your profile picture is definitely a push up bra,\u201D wrote someone anonymously (note that it\u2019s not even a question). Another simply wrote a crude expression of sexual approval we won\u2019t reprint. It\u2019s likely the questioners are either sexually charged high school boys or jealous female peers, all of whom know Christy in person, but leapt at the chance to exploit the anonymity of the Internet. \u201CI feel like it\u2019s definitely a site geared towards girls,\u201D admits Christy. \u201CThey\u2019re looking to have things said about them. I mean, it\u2019s why most girls do most things.\u201D\nSoliciting anonymous questions may be an invitation for inappropriate language, but young people who have been bullied aren\u2019t likely to accept the rationale that by joining, they asked for the treatment they got. In fact, Formspring has already weathered one PR storm back in March, when cruel comments on her Formspring page were blamed as one reason Alexis Pilkington, a West Islip, N.Y. high school student, killed herself.\nThe \u2018questions\u2019 that were posed to Pilkington might have resembled some other ones Christy once received: \u201CMy friends tell me you are a bitch, I always thought you were nice, so now I\u2019m confused, who are you?\u201D This, of course, is a danger of exposing oneself to open, anonymous questions. Anonymity doesn\u2019t means the questions don\u2019t hurt. Indeed, thanks to the way Formspring pages seem to typically be accessed &amp;#8212; through users\u2019 Facebook or Twitter accounts &amp;#8212; the questioner doing the bullying is usually someone who knows the subject in real life, and therefore knows just what buttons to try and push. \u201CThat stuff is real,\u201D Christy says. \u201CEspecially in high school, it\u2019s more effective. It doesn\u2019t really faze me though.\u201D People who are fazed, says Christy, should just log off.\nOf course, Formspring is not all bullying. There are accounts where fun, respectful questions like \u201CWhat\u2019s your biggest fear,\u201D or, \u201CFavorite book of all time?\u201D dominate the discussion. Also among the anonymous masses are users that happily interact without the cloak of anonymity. Brett Yarchin, an 18-year-old freshman at North Carolina State, is one of those people. Yarchin, under his username, once asked a friend, \u201CHow come you\u2019re always sick?\u201D to which she replied honestly, \u201CThe medication I take for my disease weakens my immune system.\u201D\nYarchin also sees more potential in the site. Though he hasn\u2019t used it in a few months, he likes the major redesign the site underwent in June. Yarchin also points out that often, anonymity is voluntarily broken: \u201CA lot of the time, it\u2019s friends joking with each other; they\u2019ll post anonymously but ask something obvious or make an inside joke so that the friend knows who it is,\u201D he says. Still, there\u2019s a stigma that comes with usage: \u201CIt\u2019s a site aimed at girls 15-19ish,\u201D he suggests.\nThe trend has caught on to such an extent that there have been cases of college admissions officers using Formspring to answer questions about a school, or, in one example, a rabbi that addresses questions of faith. Kim Duthie, an Australian high school student who recently released naked photographs of two men from the St. Kilda Football Club she accused of impregnating her, has taken to Formspring to answer media questions about her plans and feelings. (The men were cleared of wrongdoing.) To date, Duthie has answered nearly 3,000 questions.\nIt makes sense, then, that Formspring is only one of many sites that now exist for Q&amp;amp;A. The list includes Quora, Kommon, and Fluther, which Twitter bought up just this past week. Quora, however, shuns anonymity\u2014it almost reads like a Formspring for grownups. With its redesign and new funding, Formspring seems poised to try to evolve beyond its foundations. But as long as the site provides a cloak of anonymity to questioners, especially in an era where online identities are becoming even more closely tied to real life ones, Formspring will be hard-pressed to shake off the salacious questions that drove so much of its early growth.\nAgain though, Formspring isn\u2019t all sex and snobbery. In an account I created to test it out, I found myself asked, to my complete surprise, \u201CWhy were you so mean back in high school?\u201D Perhaps the questions just depend on who your friends are, and what they really want to know about you.\n*Editor&amp;#8217;s note: The word tween was used to describe Formspring&amp;#8217;s users and target demographic twice in this article, which by some definitions can include children as young as 10. Formspring says it does not target users under age 13, who legally cannot sign up for accounts. The sentences have been corrected."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2010/12/29/formspring-the-site-for-prying-questions-gears-up-but-will-it-grow-up/>