Keyboard Confessional

By Tamara Wieder, Boston Phoenix. Posted February 26, 2005.

Some people go to church. Others call their therapists. And then there are those – millions of them – who, when the urge arises to confess the frank, dirty, embarrassing, humbling, and troubling details of their lives, visit GroupHug.us.

Sound crazy? Even Jamaica Plain graphic designer Gabriel Jeffrey, who launched the Web site on a whim in the fall of 2003, never expected that within its first three months, GroupHug would receive 13 million hits. He didn't anticipate that thousands of strangers, drawn to the promise of complete anonymity, would post confessions ranging from the mundane ("I really like the taste of turkey Gerber baby food") to the momentous ("I live the kind of life that lots of others envy, but I think of suicide every day").

Now, a year and a half after its initial meteoric rise, GroupHug is still thriving – and has recently spawned a book, Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window: The Best Confessions from GroupHug.us (Justin, Charles; 2004). But Jeffrey's own confession? He's ready to move on to other projects. "My interest in it is done," admits the 25-year-old entrepreneur. "It's like a record that I really liked in high school."

How'd you come up with the idea for GroupHug?

Now and then I'll do some random project. I've been a freelance designer; while I was freelancing, I would do random projects just to keep things interesting. So I'd been wanting to do sort of a community-built magazine, and I thought anonymity would be kind of a cool feature. After distilling the idea, I wound up coming up with the idea of confessions. I figured it was a good, concise way to have a bunch of personal stories that were anonymous. So I thought about it, not really too hard, actually, for a couple of weeks before I just sat down and scribbled down my ideas and made the thing. Total, I probably spent four hours making it.

Who did you originally think would post their confessions?

Oh, just friends and friends of friends. I put it online and sent the link out to half a dozen friends, maybe, and it just started that way.

When did you first realize it was spreading beyond that?

Within a matter of days. I mean, on the first day it was up, there were 30 confessions. The second day there were maybe 50, the third day I think 150. Within a week, I was looking at thousands. Just from the third week alone, there were around 2.5 million hits.

Did you ever feel like you'd gotten in over your head?

Oh yeah, definitely. When I first started it, you would post a confession and it would go immediately to the web site. That worked fine when it was sort of a controlled group, or peers who got it. Very quickly I had to hack together a moderation system; all that did was, somebody would submit a confession, and I would have to go in and approve each one. By the end of the third week, obviously, that became unmanageable. So I got my brother and a couple of friends to start helping me moderate, and at the same time, I put out a little classified ad looking for a programmer to basically work with me for free, to figure out a better way to do it. I actually got, I think, 30 qualified applicants who wanted to do it for free, which was amazing.

Why do you think that is?

Programmers are divas, and they want their name on something big. If that means putting in some free time to build on your portfolio, it's worth it. And by that time, certainly in the web world, GroupHug was starting to be known after a few weeks. A month later I was able to launch the new one with the help of Adam Bregenzer. There have been some refinements since then, but it's really held up pretty well.

What do you think the appeal is? Obviously you didn't expect it to become so huge; why do you think it has?

I think it's kind of the whole package. When I started, I thought it was a terribly original idea, and then of course the first thing anyone does when people start to pay you any attention is to try to burst your bubble. So I got dozens of e-mails saying, "Hey, there's this site that already does that, and that site that already does that." But it was clear after a few weeks that GroupHug, for whatever reason, had caught on in a way that others hadn't.

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