When I first came across Fling app for the iOS, my first reaction to it was that it resembled the old mIRC chat rooms of yesteryear. For you youngsters who don’t know what I am talking about, before there was Skype or Facebook or Google Hangouts or Kik, people would log on to mIRC and randomly hit up total strangers to chat. Usually a chat would start with, “a/s/l?” which stands for age/sex/location. The funniest (or after a while lamest) thing you could reply was, “legal/yes please/yours or mine.” So when I downloaded Fling, I kinda got the same feeling – that random, anonymous and anything can happen feeling.

Fling is another social app to add to your list of apps (if you have any space left for another app you don’t really need). The basic concept is that you can take a photo or video or text and then ‘fling’ it across the world to up to 50 random, anonymous people (you can see where your message is sent in a nice world map which is pretty cool). These people will then read your message and can choose to reply to your message and start a conversation or do nothing at all. Other than a first name, no other information is shared unless you choose to share it.

I’m going to be honest here, it’s a novel idea, a nice play on the ‘message in a bottle’ concept of sharing a message, seeing who gets it and who replies, with a modern technological twist. But unless I’m an 18-year-old with lots of time on my hands or severely lacking friends, I’ve got better things to do with my life than send random strangers messages, hoping they too are desperate enough to reply.

That said, Fling has over 375,000 downloads and over 180,000 daily active users. So I might be wrong and people do want to interact with strangers. Or… a whole lot of people in the world are bored and/or lonely. Although, I’m guessing a lot of those photos being… Fling? Flung? Flinged? Anyway, whatever, I’m guessing they’re probably anonymous dick pics sent with copious amount of sniggering.

Only time will tell if this app will actually sustain people’s interest after the initial novelty has worn off. Till then, I look forward to receiving my first anonymous dick pic. App is only available on iOS for now with an android version in the works.