Anonymous social network Whisper announced Monday that it has redesigned its app in order to help users find people with similar interests while remaining nameless.
The company also announced that it gained $36 million in venture capital funding, according to The New York Times.
Whisper added a feature called "Categories," which lets people search through 200 genres. A variety of genres is included, such as "Faith," for people who want to talk about religion,"Tattoos and Piercings," and "NSFW."
The company chose to add these features after receiving feedback from customers who said it was hard to filter the content in the app, Mashable reported.
"Before, you would just encounter the full firehose of Whisper content, whereas now, we allow you to explore individual categories so that you don't necessarily have to look at everything at once," said Neetzan Zimmerman, editor in chief of Whisper. "We think this will help with filtering out content you don't want to see."
The new features are currently available only on iOS devices.
Zimmerman said in a phone interview that the updates were made to include an older audience that experienced problems with navigating the app, The New York Times reported.
"Whisper is not accessible to people who are over the age of 22," Zimmerman said. "With different categories we're trying to make it easier for users outside this demographic."
Whisper was launched in 2012, and has since slowly grown into one of the most popular mobile-native social networks, Mashable reported. Zimmerman said the app had 3.5 billion views in January and currently has over 6 billion views per month.
Algorithms that understand keywords and feelings are able to put Whispers in different categories, helping people connect further. For example, a user can enter "I hate coffee" and find Whispers about other people who hate, love or want coffee.
"You're basically creating these mini communities around different sentiments," Zimmerman said. "This is the way that we build communities through anonymity."
This feature has its errors. Using keywords and sentiments to group topics can result in different Whispers ending up in the same categories, The New York Times reported.
Users will now also be able to explore other locations on a map. This feature allows users to communicate with people from different parts of the world.
"We don't want people being limited to just their backyard," Zimmerman said.
