You spend more time with your coworkers than anyone else, but sometimes you don’t want them to see that photo of you rolling out of a kebab shop at 5 in the morning, or you just don’t want to be endorsed for a skill you weren’t aware you had by 15 different people you used to work with once. That’s where Anchor comes in, it’s a lot more social than LinkedIn, but a bit more business orientated than Facebook.
To get access to Anchor, you need to use your official @work email address when you register, this will add you to your companies ‘team’. You can then divide it up into smaller teams, people you’re currently collaborating with, people you go to lunch with, people who enjoy funny photos of cats etc. You then share things you think other people in each sub-team would be interested in or the whole group. There are also options to one-to-one chat with people, ‘like’ other peoples posts and scroll through peoples profiles to see what they have posted.
The apps design is very stylish and the grey with a hint-of-mint colour scheme works really well. The interface is quick and easy to use and everything is organised in a way that you will be able to find. Even though it’s aimed at the workplace, it’s not designed for sharing files and folders for work – it’s supposed to be used for making the workplace more social. The ability to share photo’s, links to things people may find interesting, geo-location position yourself and even tag other members of your team in your posts make it a really powerful social network, without a lot of the spam that comes with many of the other big names.
The tagline for Anchor is slightly cringe-worthy ‘Work Awesome’, which is the only real problem I have with it. It’s completely free (there is no mention of how they are going to monetize it, but I think this is going to come in the future) and it’s great for connecting with people you work with and not having to worry about the PR nightmare that is adding your colleagues on Facebook. It’s definitely a social network app to keep an eye on in the future.