Psst: Want to know a secret?
Shenae Von Liebt did, so she asked a few friends via Twitter to tell her theirs. "I was reading one of my Post Secret books while waiting in church's parking lot," she recalls. "I was bored with it and tweeted for everyone to text me a secret of theirs. Someone then told me it wasn't fun unless I shared, so I started sharing them."
The 25-year-old Colorado Springs resident and self-confessed tech junkie -- she has the words "Computer Love" tattooed behind her ear -- has since turned her interest in other people's dirty laundry into a 2,000-plus following on Twitter, simply by having people send her their secrets every Thursday evening, after which she anonymizes and tweets them.
Not surprisingly, a large percentage of the secrets are about sex. Her most recent batch included such revelations as, "I pour alcohol all over me and make boys lick it off and whomever's tongue feels the best to me, I end up fucking them," and, "One week I was so horny I brought my vibe to work and masturbated during break." But not all the cubical-confessions are sex-related. There are also petty confessions -- about eating someone's doughnut or hating a friend's photography. And there are secrets that should never be told, if only because they don't make much sense: "I honestly try to read peoples minds on a daily basis. It hasn't worked yet, but I'm still hopeful."
All in all, it's a pretty compelling use of Twitter, even if it does get a bit heavy sometimes. "I've had ones about suicide, drugs, anorexia, etc. where I will retweet the positive things that people are saying along with ways to get help," she says. "The craziest tweet I got was one about wanting to kill someone if they could get away with it."
When she isn't telling others' secrets -- with a few of her own mixed in for good measure, she admits -- she tends to tweet about the same stuff everyone else does. "I update about my daily life, everything from car accidents, to getting pulled over to making funnel cakes and playing Guitar Hero," she says. Looking forward, she hopes to someday put together a book of her Twitter confessions. In the meantime, your access to the Internet's latest window into the darker parts of people's souls is just a follow away.