Investors have pegged Snapchat ‘s valuation at $2 billion thanks to the soaring popularity of its self-destructing photo-sharing service. Riding this tidal wave of attention, a number of startups has launched their own ephemeral messaging apps, but few if any have nailed an experience as smart as Snapchat’s–until now.

Confide’s secret sauce is a simple design that’s both functional and fun.

Yesterday, Yext CEO Howard Lerman and former AOL exec Jon Brod unveiled Confide, an app that enables users to exchange confidential messages, which disappear after being read. The service is aimed at professionals–rather than sexting-obsessed teens–who don’t want their private and often sensitive exchanges digitally archived or shared with others (like, say, journalists). But as others are creating unnecessarily quirky tricks to protect our privacy, the secret sauce of Confide is its simple design that’s both functional and fun–a user experience that gets to the heart of what helped distinguish Snapchat from its rivals in the space.





Sending a Confide message to a friend is no different than sending an email or SMS by smartphone. What separates the service is how the recipient views your note: The words and lines of a message arrive cloaked in solid-color blocks, like a government censored document. In order to uncover the text, you must press down and drag your finger along the words to unveil them; the blocks will reappear to hide the words when you’re no longer touching them on screen. It’s an interaction that’s certainly practical–making it nearly impossible for users to take a screenshot of the message or see the text in its entirety all at once–but it’s also pleasurable, letting the recipient play an active role in revealing the hidden message.

Perhaps that’s one reason why the team refers to the interaction as “the wand.” There’s something magical about performing the action–like the characters in Harry Potter casting a spell to reveal a diary’s invisible ink. Best of all, it smartly allows users to send longer messages without pressuring the recipient with a countdown clock–since there’s no danger of a screenshot being taken, there’s no need for the message to have a self-destruct timer (though users can only view it once). When the user is finished, he or she simply closes the message and it’s gone forever. “We tried a bunch of different things before we came up with the idea to allow a user to use their finger as a wand to read text,” Lerman says. “It’s fast; it masks someone from reading [the message]; and it feels right.”

You don’t need ticking time bombs to make users feel like Inspector Gadget.

An endless number of competitors in the space have tried to recreate this peekaboo-style sensation without much success. There’s SecretInk, which allows users to send what looks to be a physical envelope by email that contains a message that “burns” after a certain timespan. There’s Peek (formerly Skim) which erases text slowly as you read it–the message vanishes before your eyes one word at a time. There’s Frankly, which blurs messages after they’re viewed, as well as Gryphn, which just deletes them. And there’s Burn Note, which requires that users shine a spotlight over each word, as if they were reading the message in the dark with a flashlight.