Vibes at the Occupy Wall Street protest.

Vibe, the anonymous microblogging service used during the Occupy Wall Street protests in the fall, is back. The app has a new release for iPhone and, later today, Android as well. The releases are timed to the citywide Occupy Wall Street protests planned for tomorrow.

Vibe works like Twitter, but users don't have to register their names. Instead, a message is pinned to a specific location and shown only to users within the designated radius. Vibe also allows users to set an expiration date on their messages. Activists can use the service to coordinate in real-time, creator Hazem Sayed told Betabeat, and recently it's been discovered by users in the Middle East.

The new features should make Vibe even more appealing to protesters. "The main thing that's been added is this idea of a double hashtag," Mr. Sayed said. "Unlike the standard hashtag, where you put it in and it's vis to everyone, a double hashtag makes that thread invisible. So if you do ##newyorkcity, it doesn't show up in the public stream. The only way to find it is to search for it explicitly."

The technology could be useful for groups of students, families traveling, and departments within a corporate building, he said. Some working groups, or committees, involved with Occupy Wall Street have been using the double hashtag feature to communicate rather than trade email addresses and phone numbers. "I consider it like a user password," Mr. Sayed said.

The new iPhone version, which has a few more features than the new Android release, will also allow users to pin messages to remote locations that will only be visible to people at that location. "It's like you're sending a letter," Mr. Sayed said.

He's encouraging Occupy Wall Street participants to post messages that will be projected onto a screen in Bryant Park. The May 1 protest will be on a "much larger scale than at any time in Occupy Wall Street," he said.

With the recent decision by a New York judge to uphold a subpoena of an Occupy Wall Street protester's tweets, Vibe is more relevant than ever. "I'm more interested in the focus on Vibe being a freedom of expression tool," Mr. Sayed said. "I won't say focused on politics, but more privacy-robust."

Mr. Sayed advertises Vibe as "anonymous" and "secure." So what happens if the police subpoena Vibe's data after the protests? "Certainly if we were served, we'd fight it to the extent that we can," he said.

In December Mr. Sayed sold a majority of Vibe to Betaworks, which is using the technology for a less anarchist purpose. He has continued working on Vibe as a separate project.

Well, as TechCrunch reported yesterday, we weren't the only ones to take note. Betaworks quietly acquired Vibe back in December. According to the blog, the deal was "likely in the low six figures, with Betaworks now owning a majority of Vibe." In a post on the Betaworks Tumblr this morning, CEO John Borthwick wrote, "There’s no better feeling than falling in love," noting that Mr. Sayed will stay on to run the company.

Unlike Twitter, Vibe offers iPhone users the ability to limit their messages, photos, or videos to a specific, geo-fenced location, ranging from a "whisper" (so only those people 165 feet around you can see) up to a "bellow" (visible to the whole wide open). What's more, the service also offers a temporal option, so that posts can expire in 15 minutes or 30 days. Starting to see why it was so popular with the OWS crowd?

"Freedom of expression while mobile is what Vibe offers - whether at political protests, Q&A at conferences, group communication among students and coworkers, etc.  All are equally important," Mr. Sayed said in an email to Betabeat this morning, adding, "Social anonymity will always be an optional and important part of Vibe."

"Here was a simple, real-time, social application with an amazing ability to connect people, friends and strangers alike. In other words, just our kind of thing," Mr. Borthwick wrote of the acquisition. Mr. Sayed told Betabeat, "Vibe fits in with betaworks' interest and work in the real time social web - enabling it and making it more accessible."

As TechCrunch pointed out, there are still some snags in the service. In order to see "vibes" on a map, for example, you have to download another app by Mr. Sayed called AskLocal. "I suspect betaworks is throwing additional engineers at Vibe to improve it beyond its basic concept," said Erick Schonfeld.

Judging by Vibe's stream of tweets once the news broke, the team had been just waiting to exhale. Fellow Betaworks companies like Chartbeat are already slapping their newest family member on the back.

after close analysis, we found it's ON FIRE! MT @VibeApp @chartbeat Can you give us metrics the reach of this article? chart.bt/zjlz3U

— chartbeat (@chartbeat) February 23, 2012

Here's what the Vibe projector looked like in Zuccotti Park:

Vibes at the Occupy Wall Street protest

Down at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccott Park a few blocks from Wall Street, Hazem Sayed is a popular man. Betabeat made Mr. Sayed's acquaintance in front of a projection of messages posted via the Vibe app, a Twitter-esque platform that tags every message with a location but no other identifying information, and our conversation was repeatedly interrupted with queries about the Vibes being projected onto a screen that had been draped over the side of a halal cart. "Can I write something?" "Who wrote that?" The police had repeatedly torn down the screen when it was hoisted up on its own stand because they said it obstructed their view of the protest. "But tonight they seem cool," Mr. Sayed said.

Mr. Sayed's background is in civil engineering and architecture--he built Vibe in May, and its predecessor AskLocal in December, as a completely open forum for people to connect and post thoughts, items for sale, events, and the like. It's a pro-privacy alternative to the data mining social networks that have become so popular in recent years. "I'm not on Twitter, not on Facebook, not on LinkedIn," he said. "I like anonymity, which is why I wrote this thing."

Mr. Sayed designed the app and hired a development shop to take care of the execution. The two apps only require a user's location and Mr. Sayed doesn't store IP addresses or require registration from users, so although the messages aren't encrypted there is still a high level of privacy preserved. The apps must be used from a mobile device.

Mr. Sayed lives in New York but he's traversed the country showcasing Vibe, which he describes as a "point and shoot" version of the more robust AskLocal, an app that allows for posting messages pinned to any location and deciding the radius for who can respond, as well as whether the responses will be public or private. Messages on Vibe are cross-posted to AskLocal. So someone in the back of an auditorium could pose an anonymous question to a speaker or the audience--someone across the world could also place a question about the protest in Zuccotti Park and require responders to be located in the park and even make their replies only privately visible.

From AskLocal's description:

Imagine using this to announce a block party that only people in your block can see, or posting a question on a college campus that only campus people can reply to.

Imagine using this to sell something locally or across the country...

Imagine the possibilities... Buy/sell, job postings, announcements, questions, polls, etc.

The main difference between AskLocal and Vibe, as far as we could tell, is that Vibe is stripped down--you don't have the option to make your replies private, for example--and more immediate, better for chatting with strangers.

Mr. Sayed was traveling in California when he saw Vibes being posted from the protest--the first he'd heard of the ragtag demonstration being staged in the Financial District. He'd been taking Vibe on a roadshow, setting up projections at MIT and in Happy Donuts, brought it to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and demonstrated it at Stanford. A few hundred messages are posted via the app today. "It wasn't political in the beginning," he said, although the possibilities for civic resistance were self-evident. He showed Betabeat a line of Vibes down Market Street in San Francisco which were posted after the incident of a police beating in a BART station.

Intrigued, Mr. Sayed headed down to the protest after he got back to New York and has made something of a name for himself there. He introduces himself as "White Hat"--a reference to white-hat hackers as well as to the white cap he wears. He never found out who posted the first Vibes from Occupy Wall Street.

Vibe in action at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Liberty Park Plaza.

For anyone who wasn't aware, there are a few hundred protesters hanging out downtown in a park plaza two blocks from Wall Street. Despite allegations of Twitter censorship, tweets are collating around the hashtags #occupywallst, #occupywallstreet, #ows and #nycga. So when Betabeat walked past an iPad hooked up to a projector showing short hashtagged messages with the occasional photo, we assumed we were looking at a Twitter client. Turns out that's not what it is. This app is called Vibe, the "new kid on the social media block," and it's something different: a Twitter-esque messaging system built by Hazem Sayed, a professional developer from California who built the app as an anonymous alternative to Twitter, reports the New York Daily News.

Mr. Sayed flew out to the protest after he saw people there were using his app; he's now earned the nickname "White Hat" as he wanders Liberty Park Plaza, passing out flyers for Vibe and explaining to people how to use it. Vibe is anonymous, temporal and location-specific--perfect for organizing flash mobs (or protests!) or any event you want restricted to the people in the vicinity.

One problem with using Twitter for civic resistance--as it was used in Tehran, for example-- is that it creates a real-time record that police, governments and militias can monitor, much like the Occupy Wall Street protesters have a police scanner to keep tabs on what the fuzz is up to. But Vibe limits Big Brother's surveillance ability by providing an option to limit messages to people within a certain radius. From the App Store description:

Vibe displays thoughts (text and photos) posted by nearby users whether at work, home, school, parties, ball games, conferences, etc. There's no registration so it's quick, easy and anonymous.

To contribute to the vibe, just post what's on your mind and select how far and for how long you want it visible.

You can share text, photos, and videos with people within 160 feet or miles away and for as little as 15 minutes or up to 30 days. You also have the option to tweet your vibes to your followers.

Vibe is useful at work (back channel for meetings and conferences), at school (lectures and campus life), sports (football and baseball games), and for fun (clubs, parties, treasure hunts).

Here are the distance and time options of your vibes:

How far:

• Whisper: 160 feet / 50 meters
• Speak: 160 feet / 500 meters
• Shout: 31 miles / 50 kilometers
• Yell: 311 miles / 500 kilometers
• Bellow: worldwide

How long:

• 15 minutes
• 1 hour
• 1 day
• 14 days
• 30 days

The site for the app is a placeholder, but it has a Twitter account.