By Austin Carr — Fast Company
Michael Heyward is scouring the web for military secrets, though not of the Julian Assange variety. Over black tea at a dark hotel bar in downtown Los Angeles, Heyward and I sit next to each other, noses to a laptop as he searches on Whisper, the mobile service he created that lets anyone share their innermost secrets anonymously. He’s using an internal company tool called Predict to dig up Whispers on specific topics–in this instance, about soldiers who are agonizing over their sexual preferences. Heyward zeroes in on locations like Kandahar and Bagram Airfield, in Afghanistan, soon landing on a Whisper from a bisexual Marine near Kabul who is afraid to come out to his platoon. “This guy thinks he’s the only person on the planet with this emotion, but there’s no reason he should feel alone–tons of people are like him,” says Heyward. “We created this place so you can connect with people. It’s like a Wikipedia of human emotion.”